News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
A trucker recorded this conversation with a brutally honest border patrol agent while coming back from Mexico as reported by Twitchy.com.
Border Patrol agent: How you doing, U.S. Border Patrol. How many people on board?
Travis Pope: Me.
Border Patrol agent: U.S. citizen?
Travis Pope: Yeah, but does it really matter?
Border patrol agent: Not anymore, unfortunately. Thank you.
The lovely Christine Flowers, in yesterday’s, Aug. 3, Delaware County Daily Times had an article decrying the plight of the Latin American children flooding our border that included some bald criticisms of those angry and concerned about it.
Christine, an immigration lawyer who personally knows some of the refugees, had some points it must be recognized. Mercy is good. Compassion is good. Children should be protected. Many of these children who came across should be allowed to stay.
However, once those things are conceded, questions must be asked. Is an open border with Mexico a good thing? Especially right now? Is she advocating one? Does she really believe our immigration and border laws are unnecessary and unjust?
If that is the case, she ought to have the guts to come right out and say it. If not, she better start suggesting some ways of enforcing them. For some strange reason, amnesty supporters never do. It’s a one-way street with them.
We don’t think the solution is all that complicated, namely we stop rewarding people for breaking the law. If we were to require E-Verify to be in every government agency and school, 90 percent of the problems would end.
Further why aren’t state and local law enforcement allowed to act upon the immigration laws when it makes sense for them to do so? People who ask this are called names but their arguments are not rebutted. Of course, it is pretty hard to rebut an argument that law enforcement officers enforce laws.
Finally we must demand reform in the corrupt kleptocracies that make up the nations that flood us with illegals. There is a reason why these people want to come here, after all. Once adequate reform is made, their citizens will stop trying to cross our border and if the reform is adequate enough we might not even care if the border is open.
If amnesty supporters really want a nation built upon the principle of “out of many one” they better stop with the “my way or you’re a bigot” attitude.
The Cardinal Newman Society has released a report pointing out that Common Core concerns Catholic schools too.
It notes that Common Core is not mandatory for Catholic schools — albeit education activist Peg Luksik has pointed out that this may not always be the case.
The Newman Society also said that Common Core is not intended for Catholic education, Catholic schools already outperform public ones, that Common Core is ultimately about textbooks and curriculum, that it may actually hinder a child’s education and formation and violates the principle of subsidiary, which means that human events are best handled closest to the individuals affected by the decisions being made.
Hat tip Joanne Yurchak
Congressman Tom Marino
Congressman Tom Marino (R-Pa10) hit a nerve with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca12) during remarks supporting a border security bill, Friday, Aug. 1.
“You know something that I find quite interesting about the other side?” Marino said. “Under the leadership of the former Speaker [Pelosi], and under the leadership of their former leader [Rep. Steny Hoyer], when in 2009 and 2010, they had the House, the Senate and the White House, and they knew this problem existed. They didn’t have the strength to go after it back then. But now are trying to make a political issue out of it now.”
This prompted Pelosi to say something from the floor.
Marino responded by saying “It’s true, madam leader, I did the research on it. You might want to try it. You might want to try it, madam leader. Do the research on it. Do the research. I did it. That’s one thing that you don’t do.”
After Marino sat down, Pelosi then was caught on C-SPAN cameras waddling across the aisle to apparently continue the fight.
Marino tweeted about it. “Rep. Pelosi called me an ‘insignificant person’ on the Floor of the House. I’ll ponder that for a while driving to Williamsport tonight. . . .of course I’ll be driving myself with no staff or security. And I’m just a country lawyer who worked in a bakery until he was 30.”
Pelosi is famous for her travel extravagance.
The bill passed in the House, by the way. However, as the Senate is not in session the necessary legislation is unlikely go to the President’s desk for him to veto as he promised.
Below is the entire incident courtesy of C-SPAN. Watch the heads of the stenographer and others turn starting at the 2:20 mark.
The Pennsylvania House with House Resolution 938 declared August to be “National Immunizations Month” says State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129).
“The Pennsylvania Department of Health offers assistance to obtain vaccinations through the federally funded Vaccines for Children program, which provides access to immunizations for low-income and underinsured children up to age 18,” Cox said. “Additionally, uninsured children in Pennsylvania are eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), regardless of income.”
For details on how to qualify, for Vaccines for Children visit here.
For details on CHIP, visit here.
The resolution also encourages adults to review their immunizations with their physicians. Adult vaccination recommendations can be found here.
Why back in October 2009, social scientist Jason Richwine asked “are liberals smarter than conservatives” in an article in The American.
That got us thinking and inspired this response.
When President Obama attacks Republicans or the Bush administration a pulsating W appears on the left side of his forehead. It’s a mystery.
President Obama, in a bitterly partisan and divisive press conference, yesterday, Aug. 1, condemned the Republican-controlled House of Representatives for failing to pass legislation addressing the border crisis.
So what did the GOP-controlled House do in response? They passed a bill addressing the border crisis.
And what is going to happen to this bill? Nothing, because the Democrat-controlled Senate has taken a recess.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in fact will be in Cherry HIll on Monday to campaign for New Jersey Democrats.
Priorities are priorities one supposes.
Hat tip Teri and Don Adams of Independence Hall Foundation.
Cathy Craddock has submitted this link of political cartoons featuring Obama
Yes, they actually portray President 0 in the light that is appropriate.
The site describes them as “European” albeit most seem to have been published in American newspapers.
Just not around here.
Here is a sample:
Fourth Amendment advocate and international fugitive Edward Snowden says Dropbox, the cloud storage service, is “very hostile to privacy” reports PCWorld.com.
He is recommending that those with a need for cloud storage use companies that practice “zero-knowledge”, means that the data is encrypted before it reaches the cloud and the key remains with the user.
He cited Spider Oak as an example.
Of course, unlike with Dropbox, if you lose your password with Spider Oak you files are lost forever.
By John Fund
Courtesy of National Review
With less than four months to go until Election Day, Democrats increasingly have no confidence in the Obama White House’s political instincts. As a result, more and more Democratic candidates are avoiding the president when he comes to their neighborhood. Senator Mark Udall famously avoided showing up with Obama at a fundraiser in the senator’s honor in Colorado last week. John Foust, the Democratic congressional candidate in a suburban Virginia district just outside Washington, D.C., snubbed the president this week by failing to show up for a presidential event in his area.
Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas was flabbergasted by Obama’s petulant refusal to visit the Texas border last week, calling him “aloof” and “detached” and his decision “bizarre.”
The Virginia Progress PAC, a Democratic committee supporting Senator Mark Warner, issued a list of talking points for potential donors that laid out the challenge the Obama albatross represents for Democrats this fall: “The 2014 midterm elections are shaping up to be similar to the wave elections of 1994 and 2010, particularly with an unpopular President and an unpopular piece of major legislation that will serve as a referendum on the sitting President. . . . A difficult political climate coupled with the rising unpopularity of President Obama could affect the Democratic brand as a whole and hurt Senator Warner.”
Bob Beckel, a former Democratic campaign consultant, said on Fox News this week that he spoke with a Democrat “intimately involved in [Obama’s] campaigns, both of them.” The message was sobering: “He said you have to know what it’s like to get through [presidential counselor] Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama, and I think that’s a tough deal for anybody on a staff to do. . . . [Obama] lives in a zone that nobody else goes to.”
Indeed, Democrats are becoming increasingly vocal about their concern that their president is isolated and not connecting with the political reality around him. “The Democratic party is like a wedding party with the common goal of getting to the ceremony on time,” a former Democratic congressman told me. “There is a caravan of cars, but the lead car is driven by a guy who is weaving in and out of traffic and is dangerous to the other cars behind him. Do you follow the guy you agreed to follow, or do you make your own way to the wedding? More and more people are leaving the caravan.”
All of Washington is talking about our detached president — one who would go to two fundraisers in New York last night after a plane carrying 23 Americans was shot down over Ukraine. In 2012, Obama famously flew off to fundraisers in Las Vegas the day after the Benghazi attack killed our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
“Obama does not appear to relish being chief executive,” writes liberal journalist Edward Luce in the Financial Times. Luce notes that Obama has headlined 393 fundraisers since he took office, double the number that George W. Bush had attended at this point in his presidency. Veteran journalist Patrick Smith writes, “I can think of two names for this. One is ‘outmoded arrogance.’ The other is ‘asleep at the wheel.’ Whatever the moniker, some measure of incompetence lies behind it.”
Democrats are happy for the president to raise money, which he can still do by appealing to the fat cats in the party’s environmental, gay, and feminist bases. But they increasingly don’t want to appear with him in front of ordinary voters or follow his lead on policy. For example, more and more Democrats in swing districts or states are looking for a way to separate themselves from the Obama White House’s chaotic border policy. Much of the grumbling is private for now, but it is increasingly seeping into public discourse.
And the grumbling goes beyond politics. A disengaged, petulant president who gives the impression that someone else is minding the White House store isn’t good for the country.
One presidential historian says that if the president’s bizarre behavior deepens, people will start making jokes comparing Obama to President Woodrow Wilson, who was debilitated by illness during his last two years in office, with decisions increasingly made by his aides and his wife, Edith. “The comparisons of course wouldn’t be fair, but they don’t have to be to have elements of truth to them.”