Archive for August 2006

GASTONIA, N.C. A federal effort to enlist local law enforcement officers to help identify and deport criminal illegal immigrants is a stopgap measure.

A congressional panel that included North Carolina Republican Representatives Virginia Foxx, Patrick McHenry and Sue Myrick met today in Gastonia.

The Indiana Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform also attended the hearing at Myrick’s Gastonia office.

Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph told the four House members about how local law officers can be used to combat illegal immigration. He says the Congress has let Americans us down by failing to rein in illegal immigration for decades.

The sheriff is working with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A dozen deputies were trained to screen the immigration status of people arrested in and around Charlotte.

Pendergraph says since screening began in May, his department has found that most of the immigrants who pass through his jail are here illegally.

The American people are sick and tried of being promised a bunch of futile and useless pipeline dreams–especially when it comes to reforming the illegal immigration travesty. There has been so much misrepresentation and lies evolving around this number one problem –and it has gone way beyond the point of no return, and is on the last nerve of the majority of law-abiding citizens.

Contrary to what the bogus polls are showing, 75 percent (not even close) of the American people are not in favor of eventual amnesty for millions of foreigners who have used the system not only to break the laws, but to be rewarded for their lawless behavior to boot.

First of all, there is not any way on God’s green earth that millions of “in your face” bullish foreigners are going to gain favor with a country’s citizens by threatening to take over their territory.

And secondly, the government had better recognize that they have a humongous problem that just keeps escalating and growing like a snowball rolling down a mountainside.

And thirdly, and perhaps the most important: when it comes to the reelection for incumbents, why should you be voted back into office when you haven’t done a “dang” thing to resolve this dangerous and cumbersome issue?

While you sit around trying to devise plans and manipulative strategies to retain your power status–you are hoping that the voters still have “stupid” written across their foreheads. But I am seeing a rebellious nature forming, and it’s a lot more difficult to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans.

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 (JTA) — A new pretrial ruling in the classified-information case against two former pro-Israel lobbyists raises new questions about what defines a “foreign agent” and whether the government has the right to spy on lobbyists. Ruling on whether a wiretap order was legal, Judge T.S. Ellis III said there was “ample probable cause to believe” that two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee were “agents of a foreign power.” The ruling was handed down last week and declassified Tuesday.

Ellis also said that “collection or transmission of material that is not generally available to the public” qualifies as an activity that could merit wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

Ellis, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., ruled on a motion to suppress the FISA-obtained evidence, filed by lawyers for Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former foreign policy director, and Keith Weissman, its former Iran analyst.

The defense contended that, as lobbyists, Rosen and Weissman do not qualify as the type of major threats to U.S. security that the system was designed to rout out.

The ruling could have far-reaching implications for how AIPAC functions as a lobby and how lobbyists, journalists, academics and other non-governmental researchers gather information.

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From his rolling green soybean fields above a slow river in eastern Iowa, Don Shatzer looks out over the farm where he was raised, across land he and his neighbors have farmed all their lives. Below him are the garden beds where his wife Linda grows organic vegetables to safeguard the family’s health, and the farm pond and beach he built for the grandkids. A few miles to the west lies the city of Waterloo, with a population of about 66,000. The sky is clear and the southwest wind sweet on a humid summer day.

Shatzer’s land is some of the most fertile in North America, part of the fecund breadbasket on which a continent relies. And if New Jersey’s LS Power wins the fight it has started, a 750-megawatt pulverized-coal electrical generation plant will sit right next door by 2011.

Coming to a cornfield near you?

The Shatzers, along with a dedicated coalition of local citizens, have gathered 3,000 signatures on petitions against the proposed plant. They have lawn signs, car decals, a growing library of informational handouts for public meetings, and even a blog. The couple’s whole lives are invested in this land. They say they have not yet begun to fight.

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An international airline is being prosecuted by the Labour Department over allegations it systematically allows illegal passengers into New Zealand.

Though the government department says it has lodged court papers against the carrier, its border security chief, Api Fiso, refuses to name the airline.

Labour Department spokeswoman Charlotte Bull told reporters seeking the name: “You’ll have some hard work to do.”

About 23 international airlines serve Auckland.

Officials called a press conference yesterday to hail the success of the advanced passenger processing system, which has slashed the number of asylum seekers and illegal aliens reaching New Zealand.

Under the system, airlines are obliged to ensure, before people board planes, that they are legally able to travel to New Zealand.

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Pat Buchanan’s new book has roared to the top of the Amazon best-seller list — hitting the No. 1 spot within a day of its release.

In his “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” Buchanan warns that the United States is witnessing its own death — as illegal immigration destroys the fabric of the American nation. [See our FREE Offer — Go Here Now.]

More: Buchanan says Mexico has been mounting a conscious effort to use the United States as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed.

Pat Buchanan reports that since 9/11, more than 4 million illegal immigrants have crossed our borders and there are more coming every day. He argues that our leaders in Washington lack the political will to uphold the rule of law. The melting pot is broken beyond repair and the future of our nation is at stake.

In this important book, Pat Buchanan reveals that slowly but surely, the great American Southwest is being reconquered by Mexico. These lands — which many Mexicans believe are their birthright — are being detached ethnically, linguistically, and culturally from the United States by a deliberate policy of the Mexican regime.

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Little Rock (AP) - Eleven employees of the Country Club of Little Rock have been arrested by federal authorities as part of an identity-theft investigation. U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins says the employees were arrested Thursday and will be arraigned in federal court Friday.

He says they were arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, while Social Security investigators and U.S. marshals were also involved. Cummins declined to characterize the arrests as an immigration raid, but would not say whether any of the employees were illegal immigrants.

Cummins says the charges are more focused on identity-theft issues of misuse of Social Security numbers. A call to the club’s manager was not immediately returned this afternoon, but Cummins says the club’s management had cooperated with authorities in the investigation.

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National anti-illegal immigration groups and disgruntled businesses are taking the fight against undocumented workers to California courts.

In the first of dozens of expected lawsuits, a temporary employment agency that supplies farm workers sued a grower and a two competing companies on Monday.

Using California’s unfair competition statutes, the plaintiff claimed the competitors gained an unfair advantage by hiring undocumented immigrants who accept lower wages and don’t demand pensions or workers compensation.

Similar cases claiming violations of federal anti-racketeering laws have seen mixed results. The California suits are believed to be the first based on a state’s unfair competition laws, legal experts said.

National anti-immigration groups are helping finance the legal actions, believing businesses in other states with similar laws will use the tactic and spark a national wave of litigation that could become a major deterrent to hiring illegal immigrants.

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OCEANSIDE — The racial achievement gap on the state’s Standardized Testing and Reporting Program, or STAR exams, remains substantial in Oceanside, as in the rest of California.

While 61 percent of Oceanside’s white students tested at grade level in grades two through 11 in English, about 39.5 percent of black students and 36 percent of Latino students performed at grade level in those areas, according to STAR exam results released last week.

The STAR exams, which were given in the spring, test students’ knowledge in many subjects in grades two through 11. Educators pay particular attention to English and math scores, though, because doing well in those subjects is considered by many educators to be essential for success in college and highly competitive jobs.

In Oceanside, the racial achievement gaps in math were similarly wide to the gaps that exist in English. In math, about 68.5 percent of white students performed at grade level in grades two through seven. Some 50.5 percent of black students and 43.1 percent of Latino students performed at grade level in math in grades two through seven.

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Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said on Tuesday that Italy would set up a special national task force to combat human traffickers responsible for the tragic shipwrecks, leading to scores of migrant deaths off the Italian coasts.

Amato said that the special force would be similar to the national anti-terrorism and anti-Mafia teams, which have successfully made a series of significant arrests.

After meeting with Piero Grasso, head of the National Anti-Mafia Directorate (DNA), Amato said the two groups of magistrates would be based in the Sicilian cities of Palermo and Agrigento.

The Rome-based police experts will handle the investigation and collect information obtained by the police around the country.

Human trafficking is just as dangerous as terrorism and the Mafia, according to Amato, who stressed that it “threatens society and the law.”

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