2007.06.01 "No Illegal Left Behind" Roundup
-- Sleep well, America. Your government is awake.
See previous: 2007.05.31 "No Illegal Left Behind" Roundup; -- Sleep well, America. Your government is awake. This post is backdated. Scroll down for newer content. Original timestamp 2007.06.01.01:11. Air Marshal Goes on the Record Stating
His Opinion That Flight 327 Was a Dry Run
Patterico
As most of you know, Audrey Hudson recently ran a piece in the Washington Times stating that current and former air marshals believed that Flight 327 (Annie Jacobsen’s “Terror in the Skies” flight) was a terrorist dry run. Some of my commenters complained that Ms. Hudson did not support this claim with a quote from a current air marshal, saying unequivocally that he thought Flight 327 was a terrorist dry run.
Today, in this post, current air marshal P. Jeffrey Black does exactly that.
Mr. Black is one of the current air marshals quoted in Ms. Hudson’s article: Agency management was not only covering up numerous probes and dry-run encounters from Congress and other federal law-enforcement agencies, it was also hiding these incidents from their own flying air marshals,” said P. Jeffrey Black, an air marshal stationed in Las Vegas.
When Mr. Black talked about these “numerous probes and dry-run encounters,” did he mean to include Flight 327 in that description, as Ms. Hudson had implied? I asked him, and he responded with a long and interesting statement, which is reproduced below in its entirety, with Mr. Black’s permission. All emphasis and links are his: ...
Do read the whole thing. This is the same DHS that's gonna secure the borders one of these days real soon if we'll just go ahead and give the illegals an amnesty now.
Below the fold:
- Too Bad; President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
- The End Of The Bushes?
- Buyer's remorse
- RNC faces donor falloff, fires solicitors
- Conversation with an RNC phone solicitor; send a cero peso!
- RNC Outsources Phone Solicitation to DNC, Apparently
- Frank Advice on RNC Telemarketing
- Republican Party can't find clue bag
- Iowahawk: Give 'Til it Hurts
- Get in Line, Einstein
See also:
Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Peggy Noonan
What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad." ...
Read the whole thing. See also:
RNC faces donor falloff, fires solicitors
The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.
Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.
Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.
"Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," ...
See also:
Get in Line, Einstein
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Beware legislative behemoths. Beware "comprehensive immigration reform." Any bill that is 380 pages long is bound to have nooks and crannies reflecting private deals, quiet paybacks and ad hoc arrangements that you often don't learn about until it's too late.
The main provisions of the immigration reform monster are well known. But how many knew, before reading last Saturday's Washington Post, that if Einstein were trying to get a green card, he would have to get in line with Argentine plumbers and Taiwanese accountants to qualify under the new "point system" that gives credit for such things as English proficiency and reliable work history? Good thing Albert was a patent office clerk, and that grooming isn't part of the new point system.
Until now we've had a special category for highly skilled, world-renowned and indispensable talent. Great musicians, athletes and high-tech managers come in today under the EB-1 visa. This apparently is going to be abolished in the name of an idiotic egalitarianism.
I suspect this provision is a kind of apology for one of the few very good ideas in the bill -- taking skill, education and English proficiency into account rather just family ties, and thus cutting back on a chain migration system in which the Yemeni laborer can bring over an entire clan while the engineers and teachers desperate to get here languish in the old country.
The price for this lurch into rationality appears to be the abolition of the VIP fast track, which constitutes less than 2 percent of total immigration and, from the point of view of the national interest, is the most valuable. This staggeringly stupid idea is reason alone to vote against the immigration bill.
Beyond stupidity, the bill offers farce. ...
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