Some Much-Needed Perspective

The following is a letter to the editor submitted to a local paper by a friend of a friend. The letter makes some very important points.

God’s Role, Not Government’s   by Don Keel

I’ve noticed breathtaking naivete displayed through forum letters and articles recently. Some clergy have advocated government as the means to follow Christ‘s teaching to help “the least among us.” The very nature and mission of government and Christ are diametrically opposed.

Christian charity is voluntary, rewarding the giver as well as the receiver. Government programs require forced confiscation of earnings through threat of fines or imprisonment. The receiver of Christian charity is humbled by the kindness of neighbors and he often receives his blessing in a way that glorifies Christ. This, in turn, will increase the likelihood that he will strive for self-reliance and inspire him to one day ‘pay it forward.’ Government programs redistribute mass amounts of earnings with very little scrutiny or accountability.

Because of the “blanket approach,” government programs reward bad behavior and punish good behavior. They punish ambition and encourage sloth and dependency. This in turn creates a cycle of dependency that destroys one’s dignity, self-esteem, self-worth, and ambition and creates a cycle that is almost impossible to break. Some people have found a way to grow their families by taking from another person’s family and have found a way to live ever increasingly in comfort by taking comforts away from another who actually worked for that privilege.

The Gospels contain many accounts of spiritually-impelled charity, but never does Jesus advocate government-forced charity. American government was to confine itself to protecting God-given rights. The word “entitlement” denotes a right or claim. In the modern welfare state, it means a right to someone else’s money. Such a punitive “right” nullifies the legitimate rights of others to their own property. It, in a sense, forces others to work for the benefit of others–a notion rejected in this country years ago and addressed in the 13th Amendment.

I would submit that no Christian would advocate forcibly taking from one and giving to another. Yet that is what our government does. They would rightly regard such taking as theft–prohibited by one of the Ten Commandments, the cornerstone of God’s Law on Earth. Delegating that authority to the government does not somehow change the character of what entitlement programs are. Delegating that authority to government does not sanctify taking private property. The 8th Commandment does not say, “Thou Shalt Not Steal…except by majority vote.” Clearly, some clergy have confused what is to be rendered to Caesar with what should be rendered to God.

Don Keel

Where The Social Security Money Goes

We have heard all sorts of horror stories that Social Security will go bankrupt if the benefits are not cut. We have heard stories that the younger people paying in will never see a penny of their money. We have heard stories of benefits being limited for those Americans who actually saved for retirement. We have heard very few stories of how the Social Security Administration spends the money it has.

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon posted a story about how some of the money taken in by the Social Security Administration was spent.

The article reports:

The Social Security Administration billed taxpayers $32 million for work conferences, according to a new audit.

The inspector general for the agency reported that just over 300 conferences cost taxpayers roughly $100,000 each in travel, meals, and lodging expenses during a three-year period.

The audit found that the agency mostly complied with federal reporting requirements to disclose conferences that cost $20,000 or more. The inspector general did find two instances where those conferences were not reported, because initial cost estimates fell below the $20,000 threshold.

Another reason to drain the swamp. How much of the money spent could have been used to shore up the program or provide Cost of Living Allowances for senior citizens?

 

The Real Election Scandal Of 2016

Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about illegal voters in Virginia.

The article reports:

When Maureen Erickson registered to vote in Prince William County, she listed her home address as a street in Guatemala, in what should have been a very strong indication that she wasn’t a regular Virginia resident.

Yet she remained on the voting rolls for years, and even cast ballots in 14 different elections, up through the 2008 presidential contest. She was only purged in 2012, just ahead of the election, after she self-reported as a noncitizen, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Ms. Erickson was one of more than 5,500 noncitizens who were registered to vote in Virginia this decade, and were only bumped from the rolls after they admitted to being ineligible. Some 1,852 of them even managed to cast ballots that were likely illegal, though undetected, the PILF, a conservative voter integrity group, said in its report.

 Just as troubling, the PILF said, was Virginia’s efforts to try to hide the information from the public — a problem foundation President J. Christian Adams said began at the very top, with Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

“At the instruction of Governor McAuliffe’s political appointees, local election officials spent countless resources to prevent this information from spilling into the open,” Mr. Adams said in a statement releasing the report. “From NoVa to Norfolk and all urban and rural points in between, alien voters are casting ballots with practically no legal consequences in response.”

You would think that the person checking Ms. Erickson in at the polling place might have noticed the address and called it to the attention of their supervisor.

The discovery of illegal voters is not something that the government has been actively involved in.

The article explains:

The new PILF report is meant to put some numbers behind the scope of fraud.

Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest jurisdiction, also notched the most reports of noncitizens who had to be kicked off the rolls, with more than 1,000. Prince William County was second with 523, and Virginia Beach City was third with 517.

The PILF said those numbers could be just a fraction of the problem given that they only cover noncitizens who somehow admitted to state officials that they weren’t legally able to vote.

It is time to clean up the voter rolls. Any vote cast by someone not entitled to vote cancels out the vote of an American who is entitled to vote.

A Good Idea Whose Time Has Come

On Friday, CNS News posted a story about one area of President Trump’s proposed budget–the area of food stamps.

Here are some numbers from The Gateway Pundit in 2015:

Under Obama the poverty rate has stood at greater than 15% for three consecutive years (2010-12), the first time that has happened since the mid-1960’s.  A record number of people have been on Medicaid (72 million or 1 out of 4 Americans) and Medicare (more than 47 million Americans) during Obama’s presidency.  When Obama entered office in 2009, 31.9 million individuals received food stamp benefits. As of January 2015, 46 million people received food stamps for a 44% increase in food stamp usage since Obama took over and record numbers.  Food stamp users had topped 46 million for 38 straight months as of January 2015.  (People don’t reach out for food stamps when good paying jobs are plentiful.) Due in part to the increase in food stamps, Welfare spending  (not counting social security) reached nearly $1 trillion in 2013.

Obviously change is needed. The article at CNS News details some of the suggested changes:

In reality, the president’s proposed policy is based on two principles: requiring able-bodied adult recipients to work or prepare for work in exchange for benefits, and restoring minimal fiscal responsibility to state governments for the welfare programs they operate.

The president’s budget reasserts the basic concept that welfare should not be a one-way handout. Welfare should, instead, be based on reciprocal obligations between recipients and taxpayers.

Government should definitely support those who need assistance, but should expect recipients to engage in constructive activity in exchange for that assistance.

Work Requirements

Under the Trump reform, recipients who cannot immediately find a job would be expected to engage in “work activation,” including supervised job searching, training, and community service.

This idea of a quid pro quo between welfare recipients and society has nearly universal support among the public.

Nearly 90 percent of the public agree that “able-bodied adults that receive cash, food, housing, and medical assistance should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving those government benefits.”

It is time for those sitting in the economic wagon being pulled by working people to get out of the wagon and help pull.

The article reminds us that when Maine placed a work requirement on food stamp recipients, the number of people collecting food stamps dropped sharply. I believe Americans are basically generous people who want to help the less fortunate, but I also believe that Americans do not like being taken advantage of.

The article reports what happened in Maine:

In December 2014, Maine imposed a work requirement on this category of recipients. Under the policy, no recipient had his benefits simply cut. Instead, recipients were required to undertake state-provided training or to work in community service six hours per week.

Nearly all affected recipients chose to leave the program rather than participate in training or community service. As a result, the Maine caseload of able-bodied adults without dependent children dropped 80 percent in just a few months.

We need to learn from Maine’s experience.

The Incest Of Washington Politics

The Gateway Pundit has done a very good job of bringing up the questions and problems related to the investigation of the death of Seth Rich. Judging by the reaction when Sean Hannity brought up the subject, this is a place the political left does not want to go. Unfortunately it also seems to be a place where law enforcement does not want to go.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today which may explain part of the problem.

The article reports:

Former Head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz,  lost her position during the DNC Convention due to WikiLeaks emails being released that showed her efforts to enable Hillary Clinton to win the DNC nomination and steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.  Now Wasserman Schultz is back in the news.  This time it is because of her close ties with the Assistant US Attorney at the Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

Wasserman Schultz’s brother, Steven Wasserman, is the Assistant US Attorney at the Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.  Questions are arising whether Steven has played a part in burying the Seth Rich case in DC.  No one has yet been charged in spite of the many unanswered questions related to the murder case.  Because Rich reportedly provided emails to WikiLeaks there are many who believe Rich was murdered as a result.

This is the sort of information investigative reporters used to report. Why has it taken almost a year for this information to surface? Where are the investigative reporters?

How Media Bias Works

Mike Adams posted an article at Townhall today illustrating how the media can slant a story, provide totally false information, and convince people that they are telling the truth. The article was written by Dr. Mike Adams, a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, author of Letters to a Young Progressive, and host of www.RightlyOffended.com. Dr. Adams holds a Ph.D. in Sociology/Criminology.

The article chronicles how The Washington Post totally misrepresented an event that Dr. Adams was involved in.

The article at Townhall reports:

Washington Post reporter Cleve Wootson was recently given the responsibility of reporting on a lawsuit in which I am involved. The story he was assigned to write is actually quite simple. A California university unconstitutionally denied a student group’s request for funding to host a conservative speaker (me) on their campus. The decision to deny funding was a blatant case of viewpoint discrimination that is supported by a mountain of evidence. Thus, Wootson had an easy story to write if he simply stuck to the facts. Instead, his article wound up being a masterpiece of bad journalism.

Wootson begins his article with an image of campus violence that is totally unrelated to the group that invited me to speak. He then provides a list of “white nationalists” who have recently spoken on other campuses. He continues his journalistic hit piece by characterizing Charles Murray as a person who “has been called a white nationalist” – because, of course, anonymous accusations define the man. Only after sufficiently poisoning the well does Wootson get around to mentioning the point of the article.

The paragraph above is Mr. Wootson’s attempt to link a conservative speaker with the white nationalists group. That has recently been the tactic the political left has been using to try to squelch conservative speech. There is a local example of this that I hope to report on in the near future.

Dr. Adams then explains how this works:

Here is a newsflash for Cleve Wootson: Cleve Wootson has also been called a white nationalist!

Of course, I don’t have to say who called Cleve Wootson a white nationalist because I am using the journalistic standards of Cleve Wootson and The Washington Post. Nor do I need to mention the fact that Cleve Wootson is actually black. I’m not interested in accuracy. I just know that calling someone a white nationalist is the best way to impugn his character and to shut him down when he is trying to speak. What’s good enough for the Washington compost and Cleve Wootson is good enough for me!

An unsuspecting reader of the Washington Post story comes away with the idea that a white nationalist (aka racist) was not allowed to speak on campus. Since racism is ugly and does no one any good, that seems like a good thing. However, I am reminded of the time that the American Nazis marched in Skokie, Illinois, a town that included a number of Holocaust survivors. There were very few people in the town that supported their march, but they obtained a permit, and under the First Amendment, they were allowed to march. I hate that, but it is necessary to allow such things in order to insure the freedom of speech and assembly for everyone. The First Amendment protects our right to free speech. It says nothing about limiting the speech of those whose ideas we find offensive.

The article at Townhall concludes with another statement by Cleve Wootson and Dr. Adams’ response:

“Most recently (Adams) wrote an article outing a young woman, using her full name, and mocked her sexuality and religion. Adams’s followers have since begun sending death threats to the student.”

A little research would have shown that the woman I “outed” was the president of an LGBT club who regularly did media interviews on LGBT issues and publicly identified herself as a “queer.” Those are not my words. Those are her words. A little more research would have shown that the accusations of inciting violence were thoroughly investigated. Unsurprisingly, they were proven to be false. No one’s “followers” threatened the fragile social justice warrior. It was just another campus hoax that leftists pretended to believe in order to give their lives meaning.

But none of this business about “truth” matters to Cleve Wootson, who has been called a white nationalist. He got his degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, which is a school that offers fake classes to its semi-literate athletes. He also writes for The Washington Post, which offers fake stories to its semi-literate audience.

The Washington Post article about viewpoint discrimination is truly fake news. It is totally misleading.

Blatantly Ignoring The Protocol

In the days when we elected people to the White House who at least wanted to seem like gentlemen, it was understood that when you left office, you removed yourself from the spotlight and went on your way. Former President Obama not only did not get that message, he has chosen to be a totally sore loser after his party’s candidate lost.

Last Thursday, The Washington Times posted an article about some of former President Obama’s recent antics. It is very obvious that former President Obama is working very hard to undermine the Trump Administration. Hopefully the American public is smart enough to ignore his efforts.

The article reports:

Mr. Obama joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin to lecture America and the West to quit being so beastly to the strivers of the Third World, and open wider the borders of the West. “We can’t isolate ourselves,” the former president said from a platform at the Brandenburg Gate. “We can’t hide behind a wall.”

This is the message that resonates with Mrs. Merkel and many of the Europeans, even it strikes a sour note at home and even in Britain, coming just days after the spawn of a Libyan immigrant murdered nearly two dozen Britons, including several children, and then blew himself up at a concert arena in Manchester.

 Timing is everything, as the man said, and the president in exile used his appearance in Berlin as a coming-out party after nearly six months of playing celebrity in borrowed houses across the South Seas and the Caribbean, playing at golf instead of government. But boredom set it and when Frau Merkel agreed to receive him as a fellow head of state, well, why not? She knew she could count on him to deliver platitudes and goo-goo worthy of an American president in exile.

“One way we can do a better job is to create more opportunities for people in their home countries,” Mr. Obama said. “If there are disruptions in these countries, if there is bad governance, if there is war, or if there is poverty in this new world we live in, we can’t isolate ourselves — we can’t hide behind a wall.”

The comment about the wall is an amazing statement from someone who spent serious money to build a wall around his Washington residence.

Some of former President Obama’s actions as President were questionable at best. For example:

Mr. Obama might think (though the Secret Service probably doesn’t) that he is safe from illegal immigrants up to no good simply because of who he is. But more bad timing: Only one day after the former president’s tryst with Frau Merkel, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, revealed that Customs and Border Protection had released, at Mr. Obama’s direction, 16 members of the remarkably brutal MS-13 gang, freed to look at will for opportunities to kill and plunder.

“[The federal authorities] apprehended them, knew they were MS-13 gang members, and they processed them into our communities,” the senator told his committee.

Former President Obama’s lack of respect for the unwritten rule of removing himself from the public spotlight after leaving office is another illustration of the self-centeredness of the man. I suspect the only way he will leave the spotlight is to have the American people ignore him as irrelevant. I am hoping that will happen.

Preparing To Drain The Swamp

Yesterday Breitbart.com reported that at least three people who have been leaking information to the media from the Trump Administration will be fired when President Trump returns from Europe.

The article reports:

CBS News has confirmed from two sources that three leakers of classified information at the White House have been identified and are expected to be fired,” CBS News reported this week, adding, “Officials within the Trump White House believe leaks of Mr. Trump’s conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are a ‘deliberate attempt’ by officials who are holdovers from President Obama’s administration and are trying to damage the Trump presidency.”

 In addition, this week, chief One America News Network (OANN) White House correspondent Trey Yingst also reported that three White House leakers have been identified and referred to the proper authorities.

There were numerous land mines left in place by the Obama Administration for the Trump Administration. It is time to drain the swamp and being implementing the programs that will help the American people and the American economy. As long as there are people leaking information to damage the Trump Administration, the necessary legislation will be bogged down and nothing will be accomplished. That is the goal of the globalists in both political parties in Washington. If President Trump can be prevented from putting his pro-growth policies in place, the establishment politicians can possibly take back Washington in 2018. That would not be pretty picture for America. It is time for some people to hear the words, “You’re fired.”

This Is What Desperation Looks Like

The Washington Free Beacon is reporting today that George Soros is funding an $80 million anti-Trump network which employs former members of the controversial and now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Wow. An entire network dedicated to bringing down the President. That should tell all of us how much of a threat President Trump is to globalists.

The article reports:

The Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund, the 501(c)(4) sister organization of the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a New York-based nonprofit that receives the bulk of its funding from George Soros, announced at their spring gala Tuesday that they will be heading up the new $80 million anti-Trump network that will span 32 states and have 48 local partners, CNN reported.

The network will seek to mobilize new voters and fight voter identification laws. It will also focus on gerrymandering and automatic voter registration programs with an eye on the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, backed the new effort.

“This national network, led by working class people of color and immigrants, will supply the power and the fight we need to resist the Trump administration’s all-out assault on American values,” Ellison told CNN. “I look forward to standing with CPD Action’s leaders in the streets and in Congress to win real progressive change.”

The Center for Popular Democracy, which was founded in 2012, consists of old chapters of ACORN, the community-organizing group that was forced to close after being stripped of its federal funds following controversy in 2010.

Andrew Friedman, a co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, co-founded Make the Road New York, a Latino immigrant group that has worked alongside CPD on a number of anti-Trump campaigns. Friedman serves on the board of Make the Road New York (MRNY) and Make the Road Action Fund, which are closely linked to CPD and contain many overlapping staffers.

Note that the group is opposing voter identification. To me, this is an indication that they will be registering voters who may not legally have the right to vote.

The article further explains:

Elias (Marc Elias, Hillary Clinton’s former top campaign lawyer) was tapped as the group shifts its focus on pushing back against state-level Republican efforts on voting laws. Every Citizen Counts, a nonprofit founded by Clinton allies focused on mobilizing African American and Latino voters, was absorbed into Priorities USA.

Elias will spearhead challenges against state voting laws from the organization’s nonprofit arm, which is building a national database to be a “one-stop inventory of restrictive voting measures” that they will share with other progressive groups.

Elias previously engaged in a multi-state effort to overturn voter ID laws leading up to the 2016 presidential election. The challenges were backed by millions of dollars from Soros.

Soros has a goal of enlarging the electorate by 10 million voters by 2018, the Washington Free Beacon discovered after a trove of hacked Soros documents were released last year by DC Leaks.

The plan to grow the electorate by millions of voters and combating “suppression” was listed as a top priority in a 220-page guide from his Open Society Foundations.

“The Open Society Foundations supports efforts to encourage wider participation in U.S. elections, and opposes measures used to try to suppress voter participation,” a spokesman from the Open Society Foundations told the Free Beacon at the time.

Voter identification laws do not suppress the vote–the ensure honest elections. Most western countries do require identification to vote–America is the exception. Please follow the link to the original article. It lists the cast of characters involved in this project and their history. We can only hope that the American consumers of news will quickly realize that the sole purpose of this network is to undermine the current administration and refuse to watch the network.

Slowly The Truth Comes Out

There are very few investigative reporters working in news media right now. I don’t claim to be one of them, but I truly appreciate the work they are doing, and when possible, try to share it. One internet site that I have recently become aware of is Circa. They have done a lot of investigating into illegal government surveillance of Americans.

Yesterday Circa posted an article about the sharing of spy data on American citizens by the FBI.

The article reports:

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.

In his final congressional testimony before he was fired by President Trump this month, then-FBI Director James Comey unequivocally told lawmakers his agency used sensitive espionage data gathered about Americans without a warrant only when it was “lawfully collected, carefully overseen and checked.”

Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing instances of “disregard” for rules, inadequate training and “deficient” oversight and even one case of deliberately sharing spy data with a forbidden party.

I have a friend who once worked for the National Security Agency (NSA). I year or so ago, he assured me that the agency was not spying on Americans. Recently, he told me that he had been wrong. The group he worked with was dealing with foreign issues and played by the rules. Since that time he has learned that not everyone played by the rules. He was heartbroken when he realized that. I say that to remind everyone that we have good people working in our investigative and security agencies. The challenge for the Trump Administration will be to get the people who have abused their positions out. FBI Director Comey was a good place to start. Criminal charges are also in order where laws have been broken.

The article further reports:

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred on Comey’s watch.

The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The court also opined aloud that it fears the violations are more extensive than already disclosed. 

“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported,” the April 2017 ruling declared.

All of this is part of the ‘deep state’ that is being used to undermine the Trump Administration. All members of the deep state need to receive their pink slips as soon as possible.

How To Lie With Statistics

Yesterday Forbes posted an article analyzing the claim that green energy creates more jobs than the fossil fuel energy.

The article cites an article entitled, “Jobs? Investing in renewables beats fossil fuels,” by Allan Hoffman, a former bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Energy.

The article in Forbes reports:

Hoffman summarizes his article by writing, “If a primary national goal is to create jobs in the energy sector, investing in renewable energy is considerably more effective than investing in fossil fuels.” Supporting his argument, Hoffman writes, “Solar Foundation data indicated that in 2016 the U.S. solar industry (8,600 companies) employed 260,000 workers.”

Comparing solar industry jobs to conventional energy jobs, Hoffman writes, “How do these numbers compare with numbers in the fossil fuel industries? In 2015 workers employed directly in oil and natural gas extraction numbered about 187,000.”

Well, not so fast. When you look at how these numbers were calculated, you see a very different picture.

Forbes reports:

For solar jobs, Hoffman references data reported by the solar power industry. I looked up and found the Solar Foundation paper Hoffman references. What Hoffman defines as “workers” who are “employed” by the U.S. solar industry are actually defined by the Solar Foundation as jobs which the solar industry “supports.” The Solar Foundation liberally defines jobs “supported” by the solar power industry as to include every component on the solar industry chain, plus additional jobs like lawyers, lobbyists, public relations professionals, government employees overseeing the solar power industry, permitting officers, plumbers, electricians, salesmen, land acquisition specialists, and financiers.

For natural gas jobs, by comparison, Hoffman limits his definition to “workers employed directly in oil and natural gas extraction.” Hoffman does not include lawyers, lobbyists, public relations professionals, government oversight employees, permitting officers, plumbers, electricians, salesmen, land acquisition specialists, and financiers, as he does for the solar power industry. Even more importantly, he does not include construction workers who build natural gas power plants, workers who operate natural gas power plants, workers who survey and find natural gas deposits, workers who build equipment for natural gas power plants, etc.

Further proof that you can make statistics prove anything you want them to as long as you carefully choose the numbers you use.

The article at Forbes concludes:

Public policy officials, do not be duped. The next time somebody claims wind and solar power create more jobs than natural gas and other conventional energy sources, ask them for specific definitions and parameters of the job numbers cited. If they falsely claim the definitions and parameters are similar, call them on it. If they truthfully answer that the definitions and parameters do not match up, ask them why they are presenting deliberately misleading data.

This is another reason consumers of news need to be very skeptical of anything they read–any data can to skewed to reach the desired conclusion.

When Potential Victims Are Armed, Crime Goes Down

Breitbart.com posted an article today about the rise in concealed carry gun permits.

The article reports:

On May 22, Breitbart News reported that the demand for concealed carry permits witnessed its greatest surge ever between May 2016 and May 2017. Fox News referenced Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) data showing there were 14.5 million permit holders in May 2016 and approximately 15.7 million in May 2017.

Now the NRA is tweeting data which shows that the bigger picture is not just the one-year surge but a 215 percent jump in concealed carry permits between 2007 and 2015.

…It is interesting to note that the murder rate dropped by 14 percent while concealed carry permits surged. And “the overall violent crime rate” dropped by 21 percent. This is not what the left tells us will happen if concealed carry expands.

This is simply common sense–Grandma is less likely to be mugged if she might be packing!

The article further reports:

On December 4, 2013, Breitbart News reported a Congressional Research Study (CRS) which showed a similar correlation between gun ownership and plummeting murder numbers. Gun ownership climbed from 192 million firearms in 1994 to 310 million firearms in 2009, CRS found that murder rates fell sharply during the same time period. According to the report, the “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” rate was 6.6 per 100,000 Americans in 1993 but fell to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2000. By 2011, the murder rate was 3.2 per 100,000.

Even if you disarmed every law-abiding citizen in America, criminals would still find a way to obtain firearms. At that point you would have armed the criminals and disarmed the victims–not a good idea. I would love to live in a world where guns and other weapons were not necessary at all, but unless human nature undergoes a drastic change, I don’t see that happening. Meanwhile, keep calm and carry.

What Does This Accomplish?

One of the things that needs to be listed in the legacy of the Obama Administration is the dividing of Americans into sub-groups. It seems as if we are no longer Americans–we are Hispanics, Blacks, feminists, etc. Occasionally this reaches a point where it is not only ridiculous, but harmful to innocent people.

The Daily Wire posted an article on its website yesterday that illustrates how silly we have become.

The following story is featured on a number of websites, this is from CSNBBS:

Just one week after Kooks Burritos in Portland, Ore., was featured in a profile for local publication Willamette Week, the pop-up Mexican food cart has closed down amid accusations that they ripped off their recipes.

Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly, the two white women who started Kooks earlier this year, have been accused of stealing their techniques from the “tortilla ladies” of Puerto Nuevo, Mexico — because Connelly told Willamette Week that they gathered their recipes and tortilla-making processes during a holiday road-trip to the Baja California village.

“I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did,” she told the site. “They told us the basic ingredients, and we saw them moving and stretching the dough similar to how pizza makers do before rolling it out with rolling pins.”

Note that the tortilla ladies were in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico–they were not running competing restaurants in Portland, Oregon.

The Daily Wire explains what happened next:

Getting a whiff of Wilgus and Connelly’s process of creating tortilla recipes, leftist outlets like Mic.com and The Portland Mercury pounced: painting the female entrepreneurs contributing to society as racist, sticky-fingered villains. 

“Because of Portland’s underlying racism, the people who rightly own these traditions and cultures that exist are already treated poorly. These appropriating businesses are erasing and exploiting their already marginalized identities for the purpose of profit and praise,” accused The Portland Mercury.

“People of color are nothing more than an afterthought when the white perpetrators of this tradition continue to do this on a regular basis. While Portland is supposedly a progressive place, super liberal white people usually only have other super white liberal people to answer to — which means this cycle of cultural appropriation will never end until people of color call attention to it,” the piece continued. 

Soon after, the business was forced into closing its doors, and its online presence has all but disappeared. The Portland Mercury called the closure a “victory.” 

That is so sad. It is also stupid. These people are proud because they took the livelihood away from the owners of the business because the owners of the business learned how to do something from someone the liberals regarded as underprivileged. So if I go to Italy and watch people make pizza and come home and open a pizza stand, should I be put out of business? Can only Chinese people own Chinese restaurants?

Our Founding Fathers, who believed in free enterprise and free markets, are turning over in their graves.

About That Refugee Resettlement Program

Received in my email today from Judicial Watch:

State Dept. Redacts Big Chunks of $22.8 Mil Contract to Resettle Muslim Refugees

MAY 24, 2017

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to “resettle” foreign nationals and transparency on how the money is spent depends on the agency involved. Judicial Watch has been investigating it for years, specifically the huge amount of taxpayer dollars that go to “voluntary agencies”, known as VOLAGs, to provide a wide range of services for the new arrivals. Throughout the ongoing probe Judicial Watch has found a striking difference on how government lawyers use an exemption, officially known as (b)(4), to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to withhold records. All the cases involve public funds being used to resettle foreigners on U.S. soil and Americans should be entitled to the records.

The (b)(4) exemption permits agencies to withhold trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person which is privileged or confidential. Depending on the government agency and the mood of the taxpayer-funded lawyers handling public records requests, that information is exempt from disclosure. In these cases, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) disclosed a VOLAG contract to resettle tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) that entered the U.S. through Mexico under the Obama administration while the State Department withheld large portions of a one-year, $22.8 million deal to resettle refugees from Muslim countries. Most of the UACs came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and the Obama administration blamed the sudden surge on violence in the three central American nations. The agency responsible for resettling the minors and issuing contracts for the costly services is HHS.

As a result of Judicial Watch’s work HHS furnished records  with virtually nothing redacted. Disclosed were employee salaries of VOLAGs contracted by the agency to provide services for the illegal immigrant minors, the cost of laptops, big screen TVs, food, pregnancy tests, “multicultural crayons” and shower stalls for the new arrivals. The general contract was to provide “basic shelter care” for 2,400 minors for a period of four months in 2014. This cost American taxpayers an astounding $182,129,786 and the VOLAG contracted to do it was government regular called Baptist Children and Family Services (BCFS). The breakdown includes charges of $104,215,608 for UACs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and an additional $77,914,178 for UACs at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

HHS rightfully provided all sorts of details in the records, including the cost of emergency surge beds ($104,215,608) for just four months; food for the illegal alien minors and staff ($18,198,000); medical supplies such as first aid kits, latex gloves, lice shampoo and pregnancy tests ($1,120,400); recreation items such as board games, soccer balls and jump ropes ($180,000); educational items like art paper and multicultural crayons ($180,000); laptops ($200,000) and cellphones ($160,000). Hotel accommodations for the BCFS staff was $6,765,000, the records show, and the salary for a 30-member “Incident Management Team” was $2,648,800, which breaks down to $88,293 per IMT member for the four-month period. It was outrageous that the Obama administration spent nearly $200 million of taxpayer funds to provide illegal alien children with the types of extravagant high-tech equipment and lavish benefits many American families cannot even afford for their own children.

This has become a heated issue for the government which may explain why other agencies aren’t as forthcoming in providing specific figures, thus abusing the (b)(4) exemption. The State Department, for instance, redacted huge portions of records involving contracts with VOLAGs to resettle refugees from mostly Muslim countries. The files illustrate the disparate redaction treatment given by different government agencies to the same types of records. The State Department paid a VOLAG called United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) a ghastly  $22,838,173 in one year to resettle refugees that came mostly from Muslim countries. Unlike HHS, the agency redacted information related to what the USCCB charged the government for things like furniture, personnel, equipment and other costs associated with contracts to resettle refugees. Why did one government agency hand over the same types of records that another agency claims are trade secrets? Judicial Watch is challenging the State Department’s (b)(4) exemption and will provide updates as they become available.

HHS and the State Department work with nine VOLAGs to resettle refugees and the voluntary agencies have hundreds of contractors they like to call “affiliates.” It’s a huge racket that costs American taxpayers monstrous sums and Judicial Watch is working to pinpoint the exact amount. Besides BCFS and USCCB, other VOLAGs with lucrative government gigs to resettle refugees are: Church World Service, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, International Rescue Committee, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Lutheran Immigration Refugee Services and World Relief Corporation.

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When Green Energy Kills Wildlife

On Monday The Daily Caller posted an article about the impact of ocean wind farms on the sonar capabilities of whales and other marine animals. It is known that wind farms impact radar when they are near airports, so it is not really a surprise that they would have an impact of the navigational systems of marine mammals. This report of the death of a family of whales near a wind farm comes from the United Kingdom.

The article states:

The U.K. coastguard received reports of a minke whale calf that had become separated from its mother Friday evening. By the next afternoon, it had been found dead at the mouth of the River Ore, and its mother washed up near Felixstowe. On Sunday, another dead adult whale surfaced, indicating that an entire family could have been killed.

…“There are studies that show that the sounds created by the operational noise of the turbines create vibrations under that may in fact disorient marine mammals like whales,” Bonnie Brady, director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association who regularly discusses the impacts of noise on marine mammals, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the case of what looks like this mother and calf, they go on the wrong path and end up disoriented then beaching themselves. The sound kills.”

Both construction and ordinary operations noises from offshore wind turbines can travel immense distances under water. This harms whales, dolphins, marine mammals and fish that communicate with noises in order to breed. For this reason, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) guidelines show that high noise levels can cause marine mammals like whales and dolphins to go deaf and disrupt their vocal communications.

The acoustic disturbances from constructing wind farms and from the wind farms themselves are harmful to fish and water mammals. Combined with the fact that the wind cannot be depended on to generate electricity 24/7 and a backup fossil fuel energy source is needed for those times when the wind dies down, wind energy is not yet at a point where it makes sense. In America, wind farms are killing some of our most magnificent birds. We need to either improve the wind farm technology or look in another direction for alternative energy sources.

When Budget Cuts Are Actually Budget Increases

Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial about President Trump‘s budget proposal.

The article included the following graph:

As you can see, the federal budget does increase. However, it increases at a lower rate than it would if baseline budgeting were used. Baseline budgeting is a tactic used by people who want to grow the government to convince the rest of us that the sky is falling. It is very simple–if you got a 3% budget increase last year and you get a 2% increase this year, your budget has been cut (even though it grew by 2%).

The article further reports:

Trump’s proposed spending cuts for entitlement programs have been described as “massive,” “sweeping,” and on the surface, the $1.7 trillion spending cuts Trump proposes look massive.

But these reports always leave out one key fact. Spending on entitlement programs isn’t being cut. At least not in the traditional sense of spending less next year than you spend this year. Trump’s budget doesn’t touch Social Security or Medicare, and only slows the growth of the remaining “safety net” programs.

In fact, the projected 10-year spending for all entitlement programs under Trump’s budget would be trimmed by less than 8%. (See the accompanying chart.)

Some analysts say Trump’s budget would end up cutting $1.4 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years, because his proposed $610 billion in savings from reforming the program would come on top of the $800 billion proposed cuts contained in the House ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill. (The budget doesn’t spell this out, but does contain a mysterious “allowance for ObamaCare repeal and replace” line item, with annual savings that match up to spending reductions in the House repeal bill.)

If true, that looks like a huge chunk, even from a program slated to spend $5.3 trillion. But keep in mind that states also contribute almost an equal share to Medicaid. In fact, when you combine federal and state spending, Medicaid is forecast to shell out more than $8 trillion over the next decade.

The article concludes:

Is Trump’s budget perfect? Hardly. We’d prefer that he tackle Social Security and Medicare reform in addition to Medicaid. The ObamaCare repeal savings are likely exaggerated. His $200 billion in infrastructure spending will only whet the appetite of lawmakers.

But on balance, this budget is far more realistic, and more responsible, than anything that ever came out of the Obama White House.

And as a statement of Trump’s governing principles — which is really all the presidents’ budgets ever amount to — Trump’s focus on spending restraint, entitlement reform, work incentives and on removing government impediments to growth is spot on.

In the world of Washington politics, power is measured by how much money you control. Bureaucrats love to spend our money. They will not give up that power easily. There will be a lot of people running around in the coming days yelling “the sky is falling.” They are misinformed. I wish this budget could pass Congress in its present form, but that is highly unlikely. However, I hope that the principles behind the budget will somehow survive and we will see a recognition of the fact that we are currently spending ourselves into destruction. The Washington establishment will not go down easily, but they seriously need to go down.

How Universities Limit Free Thought

On Sunday The Weekly Standard posted an article about some recent events at Duke University’s Divinity School. Paul Griffiths is an English-born possessor, whose specialty is Catholic theology. His resume includes writing ten scholarly books and co-authoring or editing seven others. His resume also includes teaching stints at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article quotes an email Professor Griffiths received in February:

On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee, I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5. We have secured funding from the Provost to provide this training free to our community and we hope that this will be a first step in a longer process of working to ensure that DDS is an institution that is both equitable and anti-racist in its practices and culture. … We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe it will have great dividends for our community. … Duke Divinity School will host a Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training on March 4 and 5, 2017, 8:30—5 pm both days. Participants should plan to attend both full days of training.

Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history. To understand racism and effectively begin dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, and committed effort” (REI). Phase I provides foundational training in understanding historical and institutional racism. It helps individuals and organizations begin to “proactively understand and address racism, both in their organization and in the community where the organization is working.”

In response to this email, Professor Griffiths sent out the following email:

I exhort you not to attend this training. Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.

The Professor’s email drew the following response from Elaine Heath, dean of the Duke Divinity School:

It is inappropriate and unprofessional to use mass emails to make disparaging statements–including arguments ad hominem–in order to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree. The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.

Dean Heath requested a meeting with Professor Griffiths, but that meeting was never successfully scheduled. Later Professor Griffiths was banned from faculty meetings (therefore prevented from voting in faculty affairs) and banned from future access to research or travel funds (things included in his letter of appointment).

The harassment of the Professor continues:

In early March, Griffiths hears by telephone from Cynthia Clinton, an officer of the OIE, that a complaint of harassment has been lodged against him by Portier-Young, the gravamen of which is the use of racist and/or sexist speech in such a way as to constitute a hostile workplace. A meeting is scheduled for 3/20/17 between Griffiths and representatives of the OIE to discuss this allegation. Griffiths requests from the OIE a written version of the allegation, together with its evidentiary support, in advance of the scheduled meeting. This request is declined by Clinton on behalf of the OIE, as appears typical for these proceedings. Griffiths then declines the 3/20/17 meeting, and sends a written statement to the OIE … (a copy of that statement is here).

Professor Griffiths has tendered his resignation to Duke. What a shame. According to the Duke University website, the total cost of a student spending a year at Duke is about $70,000. I wonder if parents know that they are sending their children to school that does not allow diversity of opinion.

 

 

Bringing The Federal Budget Under Control

The Washington Examiner reported yesterday that one of the steps President Trump will be taking to help balance the budget next year will be reining in tax payments to illegal immigrants.

The article reports:

Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget, set to be released Tuesday, will set higher eligibility standards for the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Monday. According to the administration, the measures will save $40 billion over 10 years.

In May 2014, The Washington Examiner reported:

The Treasury Department has released its latest report on the fight against widespread fraud in the Earned Income Tax Credit program. The problem is, fraud is still winning. And there’s not even much of a fight.

“The Internal Revenue Service continues to make little progress in reducing improper payments of Earned Income Tax Credits,” a press release from Treasury’s inspector general for Tax Administration says. “The IRS estimates that 22 to 26 percent of EITC payments were issued improperly in Fiscal Year 2013. The dollar value of these improper payments was estimated to be between $13.3 billion and $15.6 billion.”

There is no reason to continue funding tax fraud.

The article concludes:

Some anti-illegal immigration groups have said that allowing workers to claim credits without providing a Social Security number amounts to paying illegal immigrants to stay in the country. Conservative lawmakers also have favored tightening the restrictions as a matter of fiscal conservatism.

Liberal groups, though, argue that illegal immigrants pay taxes, such as payroll taxes for Social Security, for which they won’t get benefits. More generally, the low-income tax credits generally benefit needy families, even if they technically did not qualify for the benefits they received.

Why are we running huge budget deficits to pay benefits to people who are not eligible to receive them? This doesn’t make sense to me. It would be nice to see that change.

Losing Our Constitutional Rights One At A Time

Lately the First Amendment has been under attack at our colleges and universities. Speakers who do not hold views considered ‘acceptable’ are either disinvited or violently protested. However, there is another constitutional right that is also under attack–the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yesterday a website called Circa posted an article about CIA Director John Brennan’s expected testimony before Congress today.

The article reminds us:

As former CIA Director John Brennan faces Congress anew on Tuesday, there is growing evidence the Agency he oversaw has become one of the largest consumers of unmasked intelligence about Americans even though its charter prohibits it from spying on U.S. citizens.

The CIA routinely searches data collected overseas on Americans by the National Security Agency, and frequently requests the names of intercepted U.S. persons to be unmasked, once-secret government documents reviewed by Circa show.

…Brennan himself was required last September to submit an affidavit to a court declaring he would keep his agency from abusing such expanded access to Americans’ private information.

Despite the declaration, there also is evidence that the CIA has broken its rules from time to time, a potential slight to Americans’ privacy protections, the documents show.

Last year, before leaving office, former President Obama relaxed the privacy rules protecting the privacy of Americans accidentally caught up in wiretaps of phone calls. Unfortunately, that policy change has been responsible for some of the leaks coming out of the Trump Administration. The unmasking of the names associated with those leaks was a violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens.

The article explains:

But Circa reported earlier this spring that former President Barack Obama, Brennan’s boss, substantially loosened those privacy rules in 2011 allowing agencies like the CIA and FBI to more easily access unredacted intelligence on Americans. That led to a massive increase in both searches inside the NSAdatabase and the actual unmasking of Americans’ names in intelligence reports, and increased fears that such requests could be abused for political espionage.

Making a request can be as easy as saying a name is needed to understand a report.

In 2016, the NSA unmasked Americans‘ names in intelligence reports more than 1,900 times and was asked to do more than 35,000 searches of intercepted data for information on U.S. persons or their actual  intercepted conversations, according to data released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

The searches for Americans’ names in the NSA database last year amounted to a three-fold increase over 2013. Officials note that their procedures for making such requests have undergone repeated court approvals.

I don’t believe that the fact that the unmasking of Americans’ names increased dramatically during an election year is a coincidence. This is exactly what the people who opposed the Patriot Act feared. Although we need to be able to protect ourselves from attacks by terrorists, we also need to protect the rights of Americans. We have to remember what the Founding Fathers knew–not everyone elected to pubic office is an honest upstanding citizen who will abide by his or her oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. That is the reason we need to make sure our Constitutional protections remain in place.

 

They Are Already Here

Scott Johnson at Power Line posted an article today about two recently arrested brothers Abdullah and Majid Alrifahe. The men were arrested while sitting in a parked car in Minneapolis. They had thrown a food wrapper out the window. A passerby confronted them, and they became belligerent, indicating that they were armed. The passerby called the police, the police placed the men in a squad car and did a quick search of the car. They found a hand grenade, weapons, and bomb-making material.

The local news carried the story:

The article at Power Line concludes:

Abdullah Alrifahe is in custody subject to $200,000 bail; he is scheduled to appear in court next month. We can only hope in the meantime that he doesn’t make bail.

Where is brother Majid? What is the brothers’ immigration status? What were they up to?

To be continued.

This could have ended very differently.

 

A Timeline That Raises More Questions Than Answers

On Saturday, Diana West posted a chronology on her blog of the history of the hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC). It is a rather long article, and I suggest that you follow the link to read the entire article. However, there are a few things that are noteworthy that can be mentioned in passing.

When The Washington Post reported that the DNC had been hacked by Russians, they claimed that the source of the information that it was the Russians who did the hacking was “committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.” 

The article reminds us:

These “security experts” are with CrowdStrike, a private cyber security firm hired and paid by the DNC.

While reading the following chronology, it is important to bear in mind that the FBI has never examined the DNC computer network because the DNC prohibited the FBI from doing so. Also, that the FBI, under former Director Comey, not to mention President Obama and the “Intelligence Community,” thought this was perfectly ok.

That’s just odd. Since when does any organization have the right to tell the FBI how to conduct an investigation?

The article continues through a timeline of events:

December 14, 2016: Former UK Amb. to Uzbekistan and Wikileaks associate Craig Murray tells the Daily Mail that he flew to Washington in September 2016 to receive emails from one of Wikileaks’ sources. Both the DNC emails and the Podesta emails, Murray said, came from inside leaks, not hacks. “He said the leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’ “

December 22, 2016: The Washington Post reports CrowdStrike links Russian hacking of the DNC to Russian hacking of the Ukrainian military. Said CrowdStrike’s Alperovitch: ‘The fact that [these hackers] would be tracking and helping the Russian military kill Ukrainian army personnel in eastern Ukraine and also intervening in the U.S. election is quite chilling.” 

This new Russian hacking claim will be widely and loudly debunked by British, Ukrainian and other sources. 

The article ends with some references to tweets involving Seth Rich, who was murdered in Washington in July of 2016. There are some serious questions as to whether or not the murder of Seth Rich is related to the corruption in the Democratic primary elections of 2016, or if he was the source of the leaked material that was so damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I have no idea if we will ever find out the truth of the ‘hacking’ of the DNC or the murder of Seth Rich. I do hope, however, that the corruption of the Democratic Party during the primary season leading up to the 2016 presidential election will be dealt with by those within the party who may have some small amount of moral fiber. If not, it is a safe bet to say that the Democratic Party will continue to lose voters until they clean up their act.

Hopefully This Was Not A Practice Run

The problem with terrorists is that they are always probing–looking for new ways to create problems for the rest of us. One reason the attacks of 9/11 were so successful is that no one actually believed terrorists would fly planes into a buildings. Now we know that this is not unthinkable. Americans have also learned that terrorists often do practice runs to test our security in various areas. Terrorists also engage in ‘lawfare’ to create court cases that result in changes to security rules and make it easier to attack us in the future. There was an incident on Friday on a flight from Los Angeles to Hawaii that might cause our security people to sleep a little less soundly.

MSN News posted a story this morning stating that on Friday two Air Force fighter jets were scrambled to escort an American Airlines jet into Honolulu International Airport after a disturbance involving a Turkish passenger aboard the plane was reported.

The article reports:

Federal authorities were preparing a criminal complaint to charge Turkish national Anil Uskanil, 25, with interference with a flight crew, Federal Bureau of Investigation special-agent-in charge Paul Delacourt said at a Honolulu news conference.

Delacourt, when asked by a reporter if Uskanil tried to break into the cockpit, said the Turkish man was in the aisle of the plane and it was “unclear what his motivation was”.

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) police said separately that Uskanil had been detained, questioned and released hours earlier after he was caught by security there going through a terminal concourse door leading out to the airfield.

Los Angeles airport police spokesman Rob Pedregon said Uskanil was a ticketed American Airlines passenger with a boarding pass who had cleared security screening but claimed that he lost his way because he was tipsy from drinking.

As he did not appear to meet the criteria for public drunkenness, police let him go with a citation for misdemeanor trespassing, Pedregon said. He was escorted to the street in front of the terminal when released, Pedregon said.

Because the LAX incident occurred at about 2:45 a.m. Pacific time, nearly three hours before the first flights of the day, he would have had ample time to get through security again and catch a plane to Hawaii as scheduled.

This is how someone could probe airport security–go through a door they were not supposed to go through to see what happens next and then claim to be drunk and lost. This is not a comforting story. However, one of my sons-in-law just reminded me that Americans will not allow an airplane to be hijacked again–we have learned our lesson. The article states that the man was subdued by an off-duty law enforcement officer and others aboard the aircraft. The only way to prevent future hijackings is for everyone on an airplane to take responsibility for the safety of the plane. If you are young and fit, you can attack a potential hijacker. If you are older or not fit, you can throw something. There are many ways to stop a potential hijacker. Meanwhile, we have to be alert to probes of the security at our airports and on our airplanes.

A Problem Made Worse By Failure To Deal With Another Problem

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted an article yesterday about a problem in Boston that unfortunately has become a problem throughout the nation. The number of heroin overdoses in all fifty states has risen dramatically in recent years.

According to the Center for Disease Control website:

As heroin use has increased, so have heroin-related overdose deaths:

  • Heroin-related overdose deaths have more than quadrupled since 2010.
  • From 2014 to 2015, heroin overdose death rates increased by 20.6%, with nearly 13,000 people dying in 2015.
  • In 2015, males aged 25-44 had the highest heroin death rate at 13.2 per 100,000, which was an increase of 22.2% from 2014.

This is a nationwide problem. However, each area of the country has its unique source or the problem. In Boston, Massachusetts, the problem is leaked to the problem of illegal immigration.

The article at Power Line reports:

I want to focus on certain findings in the BRIC report regarding drug traffickers. According to the report, only 39 percent of those arrested for Class A Trafficking claimed to have been born in the United States. 26 percent claimed to have been born in Puerto Rico. Records showed, however, that 65 percent were born in a foreign country, with the Dominican Republic accounting for 84 percent of the foreign born arrestees.

The numbers add up to more than 100 percent because, in many cases, the records listed multiple places of birth.

The problem of multiple places of birth listed for the same person can be explained by the fact that identify fraud is involved in many of these arrests.

The article concludes:

It would seem, then, that there is a connection between heroin trafficking in Boston and illegal immigration. However, Steve Robinson, writing on the web page of the Howie Carr show, notes that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh offered to open City Hall as a sanctuary to illegal aliens facing deportation under the Trump administration. In addition, says Robinson, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker has resisted President Trump’s efforts to withdraw law enforcement grants from towns and cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities in the enforcement of immigration laws.

Might not better cooperation with federal authorities in enforcing our immigration laws — enacted by Congress, not by President Trump — help rid Boston of some who are killing Bostonians via drug overdoses?

Why would anyone even consider a law that would allow illegal aliens dealing drugs to stay in America? Everyone who comes to America illegally has broken the law. However, not everyone who comes here illegally continues to break the law. We need to gain control of our immigration so that people who want to come here and assimilate and contribute to America can come and people who want to come here and take advantage of America’s government assistance programs will be kept out. Under our present laws, people who come here illegally are not able to legally work and sometimes resort to identity fraud in order to make a living and survive. We need to find a way to let productive people stay in the country. I would suggest that illegals be given the right to work, but be barred from voting for life. It is time to get control of our borders and to know exactly who is in America.