Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

BUT THEY'RE DOING IT FOR LOVE: Half of All Federal Crimes Occur Near U.S.-Mexico Border

By Judicial Watch

Crime is so high along the Mexican border that nearly half of all the criminal cases filed by federal prosecutors in the United States last fiscal year were concentrated in a handful of districts located in that region, according to the U.S. government’s figures.

It’s not as if this is new, but to see it spelled out in a government report with a detailed breakdown is truly alarming. The statistics illustrate that the Mexican-border region is a cesspool of crime that’s costing American taxpayers a chunk of change not to mention loads of grief. There are 94 federal court districts in this country and the five located near the southern border see a large portion of criminal cases, according to the Justice Department’s annual report on criminal prosecutions. The five federal districts also have the biggest number of defendants actually convicted of federal crimes.

Of the 61,529 criminal cases initiated by federal prosecutors last fiscal year, more than 40%—or 24,746—were filed in court districts neighboring the Mexican border. This includes Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, Western Texas and Southern Texas. The two Texas districts each had more than double the convictions of all four federal court districts in the state of New York combined, according to the DOJ report. The Western Texas District had the nation’s heaviest crime flow, with 6,341 cases filed by the feds. In Southern Texas 6,130 cases were filed, 4,848 in Southern California, 3,889 in New Mexico and 3,538 in Arizona.

Not surprisingly, most of the offenses were immigration related. In fact, 38.6% of all federal cases (23,744) filed last year involved immigration, the DOJ report confirms. Nearly 22% (13,383) were drug related, 19.7% (12,123) were violent crimes and 10.2% (6,300) involved white-collar offenses that include a full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals. This is hardly earth-shattering news in fact, the nation’s southern border region has for years been known for its high crime rate compared to the rest of the country.

However, the problem has escalated at an alarming rate in the last few years. Last spring Judicial Watch reported that violence in the region has gotten so out of control that both Mexican and American journalists have largely stopped reporting it out of fear that drug cartels will retaliate against them and their families. Around the same time a small town paper in Reynosa, the twin border city of McAllen in south Texas, bravely ran a story describing the fear and panic that filled the streets during a three-hour firefight between rival drug cartels.

Sunday, August 03, 2014

OPERATION CHOKE POINT: Shutting Down Perfectly Legal Businesses for Political Reasons

By Iain Miller

Can the government shut down legal but politically disfavored businesses? If an ongoing federal regulatory campaign continues, that may be precisely what happens. In recent months, a federal government regulatory initiative called Operation Choke Point has gained increased public and media attention. Operation Choke Point is ostensibly a joint effort by various regulatory entities—the Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) most prominent among them—to reduce the chances of Americans falling victim to fraud in a variety of “high-risk” industries, predominantly payday lending. It uses existing regulatory powers to provide heightened supervision of banks that do business with the third party payment processors that provide payment services to these industries.

However, this seemingly laudable aim conceals a worrying reality. There is nothing illegal about most of these industries (at least not yet). But because they have been designated high-risk, banks are cutting off dealings with many processors and companies preemptively. As a result, many companies and individuals that have done nothing wrong have been frozen out of banking services.Without the links to banks, their financial lifeblood is choked off indeed.

Operation Choke Point echoes—and may in fact be modeled on—the federal government’s takedown of the otherwise legal American online poker industry in 2011. In that instance, regulators targeted payment processors that dealt with gambling businesses. As a result, banks became wary of doing business with those targeted payment processors. Finding their lifeblood cut off, some companies had no choice but to turn to less scrupulous processors or disguise transactions with them, leading to criminal liability—which in turn allows DOJ to close down the industry. Operation Choke Point appears to be heading down this road.

Obama's Rogue IRS Strikes Deal With Atheists To Monitor Churches -- But Not Mosques

By Investor's Business Daily

First Amendment: Government's assault on religious liberty has hit a new low as the IRS settles with atheists by promising to monitor sermons for mentions of the right to life and traditional marriage.

A lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) asserted that the Internal Revenue Service ignored complaints about churches' violating their tax-exempt status by routinely promoting political issues, legislation and candidates from the pulpit.

The FFRF has temporarily withdrawn its suit in return for the IRS's agreement to monitor sermons and homilies for proscribed speech that the foundation believes includes things like condemnation of gay marriage and criticism of ObamaCare for its contraceptive mandate.

The irony of this agreement is that it's being enforced by the same Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division of the IRS that was once headed by Lois "Fifth Amendment" Lerner and that openly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups.

Among the questions that the IRS asked of those targeted groups was the content of their prayers.

Those who objected to the monitoring of what is said and done in mosques for signs of terrorist activity have no problem with this one, though monitoring what's said in houses of worship is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Can you say "chilling effect"?

Congress can make no laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion. So it's not clear where the IRS gets off doing just that by spying on religious leaders lest they comment on issues and activities by government that are contrary to or impose on their religious consciences. Our country was founded by people fleeing this kind of government-monitored and mandated theology last practiced in the Soviet Union.

Saturday, August 02, 2014

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: No Global Warming For Nearly 18 Years

I wonder what the global warming   climate change   climate disruption grifters will have to say about this?

Remarkably, the El NiƱo warming of this year has not yet shortened the Great Pause, which, like last month, stands at 17 years 10 months with no global warming at all.

Taking the least-squares linear-regression trend on Remote Sensing Systems’ satellite-based monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, there has been no global warming – none at all – for 214 months. This is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for about half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Great Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.


..Yet the length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed...

...The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with “substantial confidence” that the science was settled and the debate over. Nature had other ideas. Though more than two dozen more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed...

...[Any r]ecent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that.

Mic drop. Walk off stage.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

RAT: Did Marxist-Racialist Luis Gutierrez Turn Federal Informant After Getting Caught Lying About his Rezko Dealings?

A timely reminder from Newsalert regarding the self-proclaimed "Hispanic Martin Luther King", Luis Gutierrez (D-IL):

Convicted political fixer Tony Rezko gave U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez free upgrades on a riverfront town house after the congressman asked for them, Gutierrez told the FBI, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

Gutierrez's comments to federal agents in a previously undisclosed 2008 interview contradict what the congressman told the Sun-Times in 2006 about the purchase.

"I walked in with my wife — as any other consumer could have — and purchased the unit at the listed price, with no considerations," the Northwest Side congressman said then, asserting that he never discussed the deal with Rezko, buying the home through a salesperson at Rezko's company, Rezmar Corp.

He told a different story when questioned by federal agents two years later about the town home he bought in River Walk, a Rezko development along the Chicago River north of Diversey, the Sun-Times has learned.

Gutierrez told them he and his wife had had dinner with Rezko and his wife, sources said, and that he told him that the price of the town home had gone up $35,000 in two weeks — from $399,000 when they first visited a model home to $434,900.

Considering that the price had risen, Gutierrez told Rezko he thought he should get some upgrades, sources said.

The upgrades eventually included an additional bathroom and higher-quality carpeting, the Sun-Times has learned...

Don't bother looking for the original story on the Sun-Times website. It's been tossed down the memory-hole, entirely by accident, I'm sure. It doesn't even appear in the archives.

As Newsalert wonders, "Did Luis become a federal informant to stay out of jail so he could inform on crime he's involved in?"

Did Gutierrez become a rat -- you know, a snitch, a snake, a punk, a narc, a fink, a stool pigeon -- to avoid federal charges?

We know he's an anti-American, Marxist, racialist rabble-rouser, so my wager would be on "yes".


Hat tip: Lee Cary

Friday, August 01, 2014

Invasion by Design

By Investor's Business Daily

Border Crisis: A new report shows the vast majority of unaccompanied minors aren't unaccompanied at all, have family members inside the U.S., are not victims of human trafficking and thus can be deported immediately.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and other Democrats have repeatedly made the argument that Republicans shouldn't complain about the current border invasion since it was a 2008 law that automatically entitles minors from noncontiguous countries to asylum hearings before they face deportation.

Gutierrez and his liberal colleagues in Congress and the media should read the law to find out what's in it.

As the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) points out in a recent report, under the definition of what constitutes an unaccompanied child (UAC) in the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, most children from countries other than Canada or Mexico do not qualify to stay here while they await a hearing.

According to CIS, the law says that to receive the UAC designation the illegal alien must be under 18 and without "a parent or legal guardian in the United States." Yet, CIS notes, about 90% of the non-Mexican and non-Canadian children pouring across the border are placed with family members or guardians in America.

"An illegal immigrant who arrives at the U.S. border who is not a victim of trafficking and has family inside the United States should not be benefiting from protections in the 2008 trafficking law," said Jon Feere, legal policy analyst at CIS.

Indeed, there's no need to amend this law to deal with the current crisis. The problem could end by strictly enforcing the letter of the 2008 law.

Human trafficking involves the transport of children against their will for illicit purposes and without the consent of their parents. The law was designed to prevent the sexual exploitation of children.

CIS notes that smuggling is not trafficking. It is not human trafficking when the families pay fees to smugglers who bring the children into the U.S.

"The Obama administration appears to be hiding behind the 2008 law and acting like it requires them to allow the current wave of illegal immigration to continue," according to the CIS report.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

I see an IRS proctological exam in Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini's future

It's just a hunch after stumbling across this segment on CNBC:

Many Americans can't afford Obamacare: Aetna CEO


The Affordable Care Act—also known as Obamacare—is "not an affordable product" for many people and it does not fix the underlying problems causing high health-care costs, Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC on Wednesday.

"If we're going to fix health care, we've got to get at the delivery of care and the cost of care," Bertolini said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "The ACA does none of that. The only person who's really going to drive that is the consumer and the decisions they make."

"Getting everybody insured should probably be our goal, but you have to have a more affordable system," he added. "We have a 1950[-style] health care system in the Unites States."

..."We have 600,000 ... customers as a result of the Affordable Care Act," Bertolini said. "We do know they are sicker. We know 87 percent are subsidized. We know they are older. So we expect they are going to use more health care."

"We priced this [Obamacare] business at lower margins in the 3 percent to 5 percent range … but we didn't plan or expect earnings as a result of those populations," he explained.

Hopefully Lois Lerner didn't catch this segment, otherwise Bertolini could be in for some very rough times ahead.


Hat tip: BadBlue Money.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

YES, THIS IS A RHETORICAL QUESTION: Is the EPA Really Interested in Your Criticism?

By Nicolas Loris

Americans will get to have their say on the Environmental Protection Agency and its proposed regulation to fight climate change this week.

The agency will hold public hearings in four cities to fulfill its promise to get stakeholder input and let everyday Americans comment on the proposed rule.

But whether the agency takes the input seriously is another matter. Given what EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy wrote on the EPA’s website, it’s not promising.

“We expect great feedback at these sessions. And unfortunately, we also expect a healthy dose of the same tired, false and worn out criticism that commonsense EPA action is bad for the economy.”

For an agency that is stressing the “importance” of an “open and inclusive process,” the EPA does not seem to actually want any feedback. This despite the fact the EPA’s climate regulations for both new and existing power plants will:

EBOLA AS A TERROR WEAPON: The Invitation That Open Borders Sends to the World's Radicals

By Investor's Business Daily

War On Terror: As the Ebola disease spreads in Africa and detainees from that continent are apprehended, the question must be asked: What if terrorists already willing to die try to bring the disease across our porous southern border?

The Ebola outbreak that has killed at least 672 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone could land in the U.S., according to John O'Connor, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It's true," he says, "that anyone with an illness is just one plane ride away from coming to the U.S." Indeed, a Liberian man infected with Ebola boarded a plane and brought the disease to Lagos, Nigeria, Africa's largest city, with 21 million people.

But what if in the future it's no accident? Nigeria is the home of Boko Haram. The Islamic terrorist group ISIL has long been recruiting terrorists in the West and is known to have members with Western, even American, passports.

Deliberately spreading the disease to the U.S. might not even require a plane ride, and it's possibile that terrorists already willing to strap bombs to their bodies might just as willingly get infected and pay a coyote to get them across our open southern border.

We remember the 9/11 Commission saying that terrorist attack was due in part to our lack of imagination. We couldn't imagine young Middle Eastern males learning to fly, but not land, passenger jets as part of a plan to fly them into skyscrapers.

The spreading of Ebola to the U.S. could be intentional, given the virus' relatively long incubation period of up to three weeks without symptoms, and no shortage of terrorists willing to die for their cause. It would be easy for an infected terrorist to slip in among the OTMs (Other Than Mexican) who have also been crossing our border.

"Central Americans are not the only ones being smuggled through Mexico to the United States," said a 2012 report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, a fact regularly reported by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

DEMOCRATS FINALLY ADMIT THE TRUTH: Amnesty is all about fundamental transformation of the U.S.

By Investor's Business Daily

Politics: Give us your poor, your tired, your future Democrats waiting to be registered. That's what some in the party are saying as they urge the president to pursue immigration goals even if it hurts in the '14 midterms.

In other words, damn the political torpedoes and full speed ahead in the fundamental demographic and political transformation of America.

"You'll always have members whose political vulnerability they tie entirely to immigration," said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. "We didn't make progress when we were in the majority because we were being protective of those (members) on immigration reform. At some point do you worry more about the future or do you continue to put off the inevitable by not taking action?"

For Democrats such as Grijalva and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., amnesty and the political benefits stemming from it are inevitable. They are quite willing to use children to exploit the inherent compassion of the American people if it means ensuring the political future of the Democratic Party through the gratitude of millions of illegal aliens allowed to come here and stay.

Gutierrez recently told a La Raza conference that it was only a "down payment" that President Obama gave the Latino community with his Deferred Action for Children Arrivals (DACA) program that halted the deportation of 600,000 of "our people":

SESSIONS SLAMS HOUSE BORDER BILL: This is a Complete ‘Surrender To a Lawless President’

Joel Gehrke relays a statement from Senator Jeff Sessions:


The Obama Administration has openly declared its plan to implement a unilateral executive amnesty for 5–6 million more illegal immigrants. This unlawful amnesty—urged on by congressional Democrats—would include work permits, taking jobs directly from millions of struggling American citizens.

Any action Congress might consider to address the current border crisis would be futile should the President go forward with these lawless actions. Congress must speak out and fight against them. It must use its spending power to stop the President’s executive amnesty.

That the House leaders’ border package includes no language on executive actions is surrender to a lawless President. And it is a submission to the subordination of congressional power.

After years of falling wages and rising joblessness, American workers are pleading for someone to hear them. How can it be that our President is brazenly advertising that he will nullify and strip away American workers’ immigration protections, and their own elected leaders will not rise to their defense? Or to the defense of our laws and our Constitutional order?

There are other grave concerns with the Granger package as well: because it does not fix our asylum rules and loopholes, the end result of the additional judges and hearings will be more illegal immigrants gaining asylum and access to U.S. welfare. It is a plan for expedited asylum, not expedited removal.

Nor will this package make our rogue President actively enforce anything, coming nowhere close to the kinds of reasonable enforcement activities needed to restore the interior application of our immigration laws.

And finally, a package that is silent on blocking amnesty creates an opportunity for Senate Democrats to add elements of their party’s open borders and mass immigration agenda.

This legislation is unworthy of support.


What can you do now? Call your Representative now and tell them to vote NO on Boehner's surrender bill.

THE MIDTERMS AND IMPEACHMENT: DƩjƠ vu all over again

Via Moe Lane, this is classic:


Let me respond appropriately:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

:Deep breath:

…HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

...Geez, read that thing. Domestic eavesdropping, government spending, Iraq, and immigration: the only reason that the economy isn’t on that list is because in March 2006 unemployment and gas prices were noticeably lower than they are right now. Basically, it really is history repeating itself – or, to quote a button I once saw: it’s History screaming “Why won’t you ever LISTEN to what I’m SAYING!” and letting fly with a club.

As the great WyBlog observes, "the only person who wants the House to impeach Barack Obama is ... Barack Obama."


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

SURPRISE: "Tech" news site Mashable is a front for the Nazi-aligned Hamas terror organization

Question: When is a tech news site actually a public relations arm for a bloodthirsty terror group?

Answer: when that tech news website is called Mashable. Consider a couple of their recent stories, designed to garner sympathy for actual bloodthirsty war criminals (no links for obvious reasons; simply search for the headline and you'll find it if you decide you prefer to read Hamas marketing material):

'Am I Going to Die, Daddy?' The Child in Gaza Asked by Jon Snow

U.N. Official Warns of Gaza War Crimes; Only U.S. Votes Against Investigating by AP

45000 Londoners Protest Israel's Operation in Gaza by Colin Daileda

13 Anonymous Admissions From Israelis About Gaza on Whisper by Brian Ries

UN Made Clear It Was Sheltering Kids But School in Gaza Still Got Hit by Mashable Team

Israel Is Losing Control of the Gaza Media War by Colin Daileda

A Day in Gaza: A Destroyed Hospital and 'Gut-Slamming Explosion' by Jonathan Miller

Thousands Flee Major Battle With Israel in Gaza, Death Toll Tops 420 by the AP

Israeli Airstrikes Injure Three Journalists in Gaza by Brian Ries

PJMedia's Bryan Preston rightfully asks, "Is Tech Site Mashable.com Siding with Hamas Terrorists?"

In “‘Am I Going to Die, Daddy?’ The Child in Gaza Asked,” reporter Jon Snow states that “If the Israelis have proved anything, it is that there is no such thing as a forensic strike.” Snow never allows for the fact while Israel tries to avoid civilian casualties, while Hamas feeds on them.

After chronicling several heart-breaking cases of kids caught up in the crossfire, Snow rhetorically asks “Can they really be the acceptable collateral damage of targeting militants?”

The tone of the entire piece puts the moral responsibility for all casualties in Gaza not on Hamas, the terrorist group that is still dedicated to destroying Israel and which started the current conflict, but on Israel...

Today’s and tomorrow’s Israelis are paying a price too, are they not? You wouldn’t know it from reading Jon Snow, or indeed anything published at Mashable...

...Snow’s piece fits well within Hamas’ anti-Israel propaganda. Why is a tech site like Mashable publishing it?

It's almost as if Snow and Mashable are operating as a free public relations firm for one of the most bloodthirsty terror groups in the world, and one that is a a direct descendant of Nazi Germany.

Here's one of many videos secretly taped in Gaza that Mashable won't show you: Hamas terrorists savagely beats Gaza civilians who heed IDF calls to leave targeted areas, for instance.

Mashable also won't tell you that the Hamazis are forcibly strapping suicide belts to children and sending them into Israeli lines at gunpoint.

Hamas is committing war crimes daily, using civilians as human shields and targeting innocents with their thousands of rockets.

Hamas is a group with direct ties to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler.

Why Mashable is promoting this Nazi sickness is beyond me, but it is reprehensible. There is no moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, none.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News (of which Mashable is no longer a member).

SESSIONS: All Americans must help stop Obama's dictatorial threats to expand Amnesty to millions

By Senator Jeff Sessions

I call on the American public to rally Congress against the President’s openly declared threat to implement, by executive order, the amnesty that Congress has rejected:

How Congress chooses to act in the coming hours and days will determine whether the President succeeds in his plan to nullify the immigration laws of the United States.

Just yesterday, TIME magazine reported that the President is considering a grant of ‘work authorization for perhaps several million undocumented immigrants.’ Permitting those illegally present in the U.S. to work and take jobs is contrary to plain law, which the President has no power to change. Yet Democratic members of Congress have openly crowed about these planned executive actions.

It has now been extensively reported that these executive actions will likely expand his Deferred Action program (DACA) to apply to an additional 5–6 million adult illegal immigrants. The existing DACA program has been widely misunderstood. The executive action did not, as The Hill writes today, only result in ‘deferred deportations for young undocumented immigrants.’ Illegal immigrants in the interior of the U.S. have already, as a practical matter, been immune from enforcement under this Administration. DACA applies to individuals up to 30 years of age and provides actual amnesty papers, photo ID, and work permits to illegal immigrants—who can then take any job in America.

The President’s planned executive orders would expand this permitting program to another 5–6 million illegal immigrants. This would effectively end immigration enforcement in America.

No Member—House or Senate, Democrat or Republican—should support any bill with respect to the border crisis that does not include language explicitly prohibiting the Administration from taking such action. Congress must foreclose any possibility of these unlawful executive actions before congressional funding is granted. This is an essential precondition.

The American people have begged and pleaded for years for our laws to be enforced.  We have people in our own country living in violence, fear, and poverty every single day.  They have demanded an immigration policy that puts their jobs, wages, and communities first. Every citizen should pick up the phone and ask of their congressional representative: where do you stand?

CALL CONGRESS NOW AND DEMAND IT BLOCK OBAMA'S PLANNED DICTATORIAL AMNESTY ORDER.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

8 Insane Things Put in Place by John McCain's $100 Million Pro-Invasion Spending Bill

We always knew John McCain was a kook. His anti-First Amendment and incumbent protection bill -- McCain-Feingold -- was an outrage. His lies to the people of Arizona when he was up for reelection in 2010 ("Secure the dang border!") were pathetic. His feckless promotion of intervention in Syria culminated in his glamour shots with members of ISIS. And his serial abuse of the Constitution and Constitutional conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee deserve nothing but scorn.

So just when you thought McCain couldn't get any dumber or more malicious, we get word of his $100,000,000 bill that promote illegal immigration. Consider the eight key facets of this epic treason:

1) Spends $100,000,000.

2) Asserts acts that are already illegal are now illegal.

3) Makes it a federal crime to tell someone where a DHS, HHS or Border Patrol bus carrying illegal aliens is spotted, coming from or headed.

4) Makes it a federal crime to prohibit a DHS, HHS or Border Patrol bus from moving from point A to point B.

5) Does absolutely nothing to secure the border and stop the invasion in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. These southern borders will remain wide open and the bill doesn’t address this.

6) Creates a communication channel between HHS and states about newly recommended facilities for housing illegal aliens.

7) Opens up U.S. facilities in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for the purpose of processing illegal aliens on foreign soil.

8) Calls for 15,000 “refugees” from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to be processed on foreign soil and transported into the U.S. this year alone.

This treasonous, reckless behavior must stop.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Top 10 things that will happen if Israel allows itself to win in Gaza

By Dan from New York


1. Iran loses one of its tentacles it meant to use to strangle Israel.

2. Having had one tentacle amputated in Gaza, Iran is loathe to lose the other one in southern Lebanon.

3. Talk about "isolation." A new calculus takes hold in Judea and Samaria. Fatah, the PA and Abbas know they're living from day to day - by the good graces of the IDF.

4. With the pressure relaxed on those fronts, Israel dusts off its plans to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

5. Having successfully defied Obama and his anti-Zionist cats-paws, Israel still has to respect the lame-duck snake, but can do so with greater confidence.

15 Reasons the Party on Wall Street is About to End in Tears

Writing at The Spectator, Liam Halligan summarizes the troubling nature of the state of the global economic system:

...alarming evidence is amassing that the global recovery is shaky, stock markets are over-hyped and the large western banks, for all the talk of reform, remain a serious liability. The reality, and it gives me no pleasure to write this, is that we could see a re-run of the ghastly credit crunch of 2007/08.

To paraphrase Clubber Lang, the following are 15 reasons that the central banking party fueling our economy will end in "pain".

1. The US Gross Domestic Product fell at an annual rate of 2.9 per cent on official figures, the first drop we’ve seen since the dark days of 2011.

2. The Eurozone, meanwhile, remains on the brink of recession, with GDP across the 18-nation currency area expanding a mere 0.2 per cent.

3. Despite this lack of growth, stock indices in the US and across the western world have repeatedly hit all-time highs in recent months.

4. Even though U.S. GDP is contracting and that US first-quarter corporate earnings were down 3.4 per cent, the S&P500 (the world’s most watched stock index) has broken its daily closing price record more than 20 times this year.

5. The reason for this dichotomy is the Federal Reserve’s money-printing machine, which has created thousands of billions of virtual dollars since 2008. Much of this has found its way into global stock markets, sending equity prices sky-high. Designed as an emergency measure, QE has since become a lifestyle choice, the financial and political equivalent of crack cocaine.

BORDER PATROL SAYS DEMOCRATS AND MEDIA ARE LYING: Illegal Surge Is Mostly Families, Not Unaccompanied Kids

By Jessica Vaughan

Border Patrol statistics found buried on a government website confirm that most of the Central American illegal aliens apprehended in the recent surge are family units. Less than one-fourth (22 percent) of all those apprehended are unaccompanied alien children (UACs) from Central America. The number of illegally arriving families shot up five times faster than UAC arrivals over last year.

The document was revealed this week by Washington Times columnist Ernest Istook.

In the first nine months of the fiscal year (October through June), the number of apprehensions along the southwest border of family units (each of which has, by definition, more than one person in it) has increased from 9,350 in 2013 to 55,420 in 2014 – an increase of nearly 500 percent.

Apprehensions of UACs went from 27,884 to 57,525 in the same period, an increase of about 100 percent.

The total number of southwest border apprehensions of aliens from countries "other than Mexico" (OTMs) was 202,951 through the end of June 2014, compared to 154,606 at this time last year.

These figures indicate that the number of individuals from Central America who arrived by June of this year as part of family units was at least 111,000 (assuming only two individuals in each family unit), but was probably closer to 145,000 (which is the number of OTMs who are not UACs).

These figures suggest that, while policies on handling UACs are important and may need to be tweaked a little, the focus of lawmakers should be on ending the administration's catch-and-release policies and reversing the general decay in immigration enforcement, which the illegal migrants themselves say has motivated them to come now.


Read more at Center for Immigration Studies

STUNNER: Obama sees no maximum limit to the tax rate

You know what they call it when the maximum tax rate hits 100 percent? Answer after the break.

The following excerpt from an interview with Dear Leader was handed to us over the transom by the inimitable James Pethokoukis:

Here is President Obama in a chat yesterday with CNBC’s Steve Liesman:

STEVE LIESMAN: Mr. President, I just want to pivot back one more time to domestic issues. You’ve said a bunch of times that getting the wealthy to pay a little bit more, and you’ve succeeded in raising that top tax rate to 39% or rolling back the tax cuts. Is there a limit there? Is there a limit to how much you believe the government should take from an individual in terms of a top tax rate?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I don’t have a particular number in mind, but if you look at our history we are still well below what, you know, the marginal tax rates were under Dwight Eisenhower or, you know, all the way up even through Ronald Reagan. Tax rates are still lower on average for most folks. And what that means is that we probably can make some more headway in closing loopholes that folks take advantage of. As opposed to necessarily raising marginal rates.

Obama’s response raises an interesting question: How high does he think tax rates could go without really damaging the economy? As my pal Liesman asked, what is the limit?

The president’s answer certainly suggests, at least to me, that he believes the US is nowhere close to the danger zone. If so, he is merely in sync with top left-leaning economists — such as Peter Diamond, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez — who argue for top rates in the 70% to 80% range, if not higher. Oh, and at the same time the high-tax crowd would close tax loopholes and increase tax enforcement to limit avoidance.

Answer: North Korea.

In fact, Obama's father was a hard-core Communist. During his time in Kenyan politics, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. challenged Kenya's government for being insufficiently socialist.

"Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed," Obama Sr. wrote.

And you wonder where Obama got his economic illiteracy from.


Related: What Barack Obama Hid From His Readers.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

BUSTED: IRS Caught Lying to Both a Federal Judge and Congress

By Investor's Business Daily

Scandal: The tangled web of IRS deceit unravels a bit more with news recycled backup tapes of lost emails still exist and statements before a federal judge that Lois Lerner's hard drive was irreparably damaged were untrue.

Deliberately destroying evidence pertaining to the investigation of possible criminal activity is a crime. So is lying about it to Congress and the courts as part of a cover-up of that activity.

On July 11, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by the targeted conservative group True the Vote, told Obama administration lawyers he wanted to see an affidavit explaining what happened with Lerner's hard drive.

He wanted something on the record and under oath that went beyond the tap dancing of recent congressional testimony. Walton also wanted to know the serial number of the hard drive and, if that number was known, "why the computer hard drive cannot be identified and preserved."

In response, the IRS said under oath that the hard drive from Lerner's computer was destroyed and recycled, echoing earlier testimony from Commissioner John Koskinen.

The reason given for Lerner's hard drive — possibly containing incriminating emails from and to the former head of the IRS Tax Exempt division — being destroyed and recycled, according to the IRS in the affidavit, was that a team of its technical experts had determined the drive was irreparably damaged and had to be recycled.

Except that was not true.