Math Is Hard: GDP Growth Stats Taking A Hint From Unemployment Numbers (via http://www.thebrennerbrief.com)
The Brenner Brief recently reported why the new unemployment number cannot be trusted, and starting this July, measures in GDP growth also cannot be trusted. In an attempt to make Obama and his economic policies look better, the U.S. is adapting how they will calculate GDP growth. GDP is an acronym…
The White House has leaked immigration legislation it’s preparing in case Congress fails to craft its own. According to USA Today, 11 million illegal aliens could apply for a “Lawful Prospective Immigrant” visa and after 8 years could get a green card. Criminals would be excluded––unless they served less than a year for their crime, or were convicted of 3 different crimes resulting in 90 days in jail. That will hearten the hit-and-run drivers and welfare cheats. Once they get a visa, their families will be in line for visas too. In other words, the president’s plan amounts to an amnesty that vaults lawbreakers, including some convicts, to the head of the immigration line.
The Republicans are squawking, but any plan they would sign off on will end up doing the same thing. Too many have drunk the electoral kool-aid and believe that caving on illegal immigrants will get them more Latino votes. But even if the Republicans’ share of Latino voters reached the 40% George W. Bush got, the Dems would still net 1.5 million more votes if illegal aliens became citizens. That’s not much of a payoff for betraying principle. And reaching that 40% appears increasingly unlikely, given that 75% of Hispanics want bigger government and more services, according to a Pew Hispanic Center poll last April, while a 2011 poll from Moore Information found that 29% think the Republican party “favors only the rich” and Republicans are “selfish and out for themselves.” They are already Democrats no matter what happens with illegal immigrants.
More important, the public discourse about illegal immigration is filled with incoherence, duplicity, and wishful thinking. One problem is the constant confusion of legal and illegal immigration. People justifiably worried about the latter are constantly chided for being “anti-immigrant” and forgetting that America is “a nation of immigrants.” But these are two separate complex problems, and trying to fix both with some “comprehensive reform” will end up with new policies that likely will make both worse. Today legal immigration is marred by “family reunification” preferences that count not just spouses and minor children but parents and siblings as “family.” Two-thirds of legal immigrants have come under these provisions, which take no account of whether or not these “family” members have skills beneficial to this country or are likely to become public charges.
via Half-Truths, Delusions, and Immigration.
The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.
The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.
“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.
The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for national security.
The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data.
by Steven Emerson and John Rossomando
IPT News
February 5, 2013
America’s top spy needs to be a steely-eyed realist, sensitive to emerging threats and keen about our foes’ intent to deceive us.
Unfortunately, President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, has shown a tendency to fall for the bait from radical Islamists. Globally, he repeatedly expressed a hope that “moderates” within Iran and its terror proxy Hizballah would steer their respective constituencies away from terrorism.
Domestically, he claims that radical Islam does not pose its own, unique threat to American security. He has helped strip language about “radical Islam,” “jihad” and similar terms from government vernacular, choosing instead to refer to “violent extremism” in an attempt to deny terrorists religious credibility. When it comes to jihad, he stubbornly maintains the word does not belong in conversations about terror, no matter what terrorists themselves say.
Likewise, he also yielded to demands from American Islamists to purge law enforcement and intelligence training material of the terms “jihad” and “radical Islam.”
Despite these positions, some American Islamists still oppose Brennan’s nomination because he is considered the architect of the drone program which has killed scores of al-Qaida terrorists.
That should tell him something. But there is little in Brennan’s record to indicate he’ll learn from the experience.
Brennan Promotes Iran-Hizballah Outreach
Brennan’s complacency regarding the jihad threat was made clear in May 2010, when he expressed a desire to encourage “moderate elements” of Hizballah, which is a State Department-designated terrorist organization.
via Obama CIA Nominee John Brennan Wrong for the Job :: The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
