A pro at misdirection

I have said it before and I will scream it again. OBAMA IS A LAWYER!.

Hey you say! lots of politicians on the hill are lawyers, whats new?

All of this is true.

But Barack Obama is from the newly taught deception era lawyers, who have been schooled most concentrically in the art of deception. Especially when you are telling a bold faced lie.

And to top it off he takes many of his plays right from Solinsky's book "Rules for Radicals."

He fails to shine in the same light as Clarence Darrow, Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, Zane Grey Staker and Jerry Stern. He isn't that bright nor truthfully that eloquent. But he is good, very good at deception of the mediocre mind.

What I have to give him credit for, is his ability to tell you perfectly formulated half truths and then use the art of "deceptive focus" as I would call it, to draw you away from the real argument and point you to the non argument, making you think that it, in itself is the point he is trying to make.

Read my first post the last paragraph then read what the lobbyists are saying. If it is not becoming clear to you perhaps you should just drink the cool aid now.

These lawyers are not taught to study case law, after case law of precedent, and dissect it. Then, repackage some of the greatest decision makers decisions, reseed them, and reinterpret the meanings.Then use your best prose to put together an argument that you can sell to a jury and a judge. Thus, to create a different perspective from which the possibility of a fair fight in a legal setting may be won in your favor. The "fine art" of lawyering.

On April 10, I posted this blog a cross article from the Under the Influence early bird. see last paragraph!frustrated lobbyists

And although I don't think Obama is good at very much I think he is an excellent and practiced narcissistic liar. He has been doing it his whole life.

When he said he was going to curtail the lobbyist's I think a lot of people said yeah right fat chance. But he has been successful in doing just what he said.

The problem is he failed to finish the sentence. It should have gone something like this.

"I want to curtail lobbyist's, so we can go back to the OLD way before lobbyist's were required to register. So our special shakers and movers whom we don't really want to admit any affiliation with can come and go as they please."
First read the old post, then below,

Lobbyists Love Obama?

By Robert Gettlin

At first glance it looks totally off base. But Gary Andres, vice chairman of research at Dutko Worldwide, has written an excellent piece in The Weekly Standard arguing that Barack Obama's Washington -- marked by the huge and rapid expansion of government -- is a gift to the lobbying and advocacy professions.

Among other things, Andres points out that the White House's rhetoric demonizing lobbying is causing an important behavioral change on K Street. Andres writes: "...some government relations executives who previously registered as lobbyists are now 'delisting' -- causing a growing number of former interest group advocates to move out of the federal disclosure regime entirely."

The article includes this quote from an executive at a major company: "Why should I take all the cheap shot criticism for being a 'lobbyist' when I spend most of my time doing other things, like managing my staff and giving advice to senior management about public policy?"

Ring true, readers?

Thank You all knuckle dragging Right Wing Wiggers

The Obama Justice Department told the Supreme Court this evening that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the United States.

The Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, received terrorist training at al Qaeda affiliated camps (from an organization formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law) and were captured after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are the Left's combatant cause célèbre. The military took the incoherent position that they were trained al Qaeda terrorists but that their real beef was with China, not us. Thus, the federal courts have held that they are not enemy combatants. The government has been trying to relocate them for years but no country will take the remaining 17 — other than China, where our treaty obligations arguably forbid us from sending them because there is reason to believe they'd be persecuted.

Of course, it's one thing to say that they are not enemy combatants and should therefore be released. It is quite another thing, though, to say that they should be released into the United States (which, because of their terrorist affiliations, would violate federal immigration law). But as Cliff noted earlier today, alluding to the stellar work of Tom Joscelyn at the Standard, federal judge Richard Urbina did try to order their release into the U.S. (Here at NRO, the editors weighed in on Judge Urbina's absurd decision, here.) Fortunately, in a well reasoned decision authored by Judge Raymond Randolph (which I discussed here), the DC Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Judge Urbina, holding that just because courts have the power to review whether a prisoner is properly designated an enemy combatant does not mean they have the power to order the release into the United States of those found not to be enemy combatants.

The Uighurs appealed, and today the Justice Department filed its responsive brief. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued — consistent with the Bush administration position — that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the U.S. As Lyle Denniston recaps at SCOTUSblog:

The brief holds to the position of the Bush Administration that a court’s power to issue a remedy in a habeas case — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s mandate that the detainees have a constitutional right to seek their freedom — is limited to a finding of eligibility for release, without an actual release from captivity while diplomatic negotiations to resettle a prisoner continue.

The D.C. Circuit Court ruled that no federal court has the authority to order release of a Guantanamo prisoner into the U.S., and the Solicitor General argued that that decision is correct.

“The court of appeals,” the brief said, “properly recognized that whether to admit an alien into the United States presents a question wholly distinct from issues concerning detention abroad — and a question that is reserved to the political Branches.”

The Supreme Court, it added, “has repeatedly stressed that whether to allow an alien into the United States is a sovereign prerogative that requires the consent of the political Branches.”

The Uighurs, the government brief said, “would like the federal courts to order that they be brought to the United States, because they are unwilling to return to their home country. But they have no entitlement to that form of relief.”

This is entirely correct, but it will enrage the Left — understandably, given that Attorney General Holder raised expectations that the Uighurs would soon be released in the U.S., prompting an outraged response from Congress (including congressional Democrats in Virginia, the likely site of any Uighur settlement in the U.S.). Watch tomorrow as our usual conservative commentator suspects insist that we must give President Obama great credit for doing the right thing for national security — and conveniently ignore that the President tends to do the right thing only after knuckle-dragging right-wingers push back against his (and his Justice Department's) reliable inclination to do the wrong t

Watch out for these "Right Wing Radicals"!

Thanks to posting by "Gateway Pundit".Click HereRight Wing Radical

PolitiFact backs Cheney; Why hasn't the MSM done the same??

Dick Cheney claims Blair said high-value information came from controversial enhanced interrogation techniques

Mostly True:Rated by PolitiFact!!!

In a speech on national security, former Vice President Dick Cheney argued that despite all the controversy about the propriety of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques used on terror suspects in the wake of 9/11, one fact has been lost - the techniques worked. And Cheney cited comments from an appointee of President Obama to back up his point.

"President Obama's own director of national intelligence, Admiral Blair, put it this way: 'High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country,'" Cheney said in a May 21, 2009, speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

"Admiral Blair put that conclusion in writing, only to see it mysteriously deleted in a later version released by the administration, the missing 26 words that tell an inconvenient truth."

Cheney is right about there being two different versions of an April 16 memo sent by Adm. Dennis C. Blair, President Obama’s director of national intelligence.

In a private version of the memo sent to his colleagues, Blair says it's important to remember the context of events that led to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

"All of us remember the horror of 9/11. For months afterwards we did not have a clear understanding of the enemy we were dealing with, and our every effort was focused on preventing further attacks that would kill more Americans. It was during these months that the CIA was struggling to obtain critical information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, and requested permission to use harsher interrogation methods....High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."

That last sentence wasn't included in an abbreviated form of the memo that was released to the public. You can check out both versions here.

Here's another line that was cut: "I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time."

But the administration isn't the only one guilty of truncating Blair's full position.

Cheney failed to mention this statement released by Blair on April 21, "I also strongly supported the president (Obama) when he declared that we would no longer use enhanced interrogation techniques. We do not need these techniques to keep America safe. The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

So Cheney mentioned the quote from Blair that the enhanced interrogations provided "high-value information," but failed to mention Blair's later clarification that while the techniques did provide information, there is no way of knowing if that information could have been obtained through other means.

Cheney also failed to mention that Blair opposes the use of the controversial interrogation techniques, that he thinks the damage they have caused far outweigh the benefits gained and that they "are not essential to our national security."

Cheney neglected to give a full account of Blair's comments. But even that additional context does not refute the core point that Cheney attributes to Blair. Even if Blair has misgivings about the techniques, he has still acknowledged the information from them "was valuable in some instances."

We find Cheney's statement Mostly True.

The Practical Implications of the WHTI

On June 1, 2009, the land and sea portion of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) will go into effect. The WHTI is a program launched as a result of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and intended to standardize the documents required to enter the United States. The stated goal of WHTI is to facilitate entry for U.S. citizens and legitimate foreign visitors while reducing the possibility of people entering the country using fraudulent documents.

Prior to the WHTI, American travelers to Mexico, Canada and several countries in the Caribbean needed only a driver’s license and birth certificate to re-enter the United States, while American travelers to other regions of the world required U.S. passports to return. This meant that immigration officials had to examine driver’s licenses and birth certificates from every state, and since the driver’s licenses and birth certificates of all the states change over time, there were literally hundreds of different types of documents that could be used by travelers at points of entry. In practical terms, this meant there was no way immigration officers could be familiar with the security features of each identification document, thereby making it easier for foreigners to use counterfeit or fraudulently altered documents to enter the country by claiming to be returning U.S. citizens.

The air portion of the WHTI went into effect in January 2007 and required that all international air travelers use passports to enter the United States. However, the land and sea implementation of WHTI will be a little different from the air portion. In addition to passports, travelers can also use U.S. passport cards (a driver’s license-sized identification document), an enhanced driver’s license (which are currently being issued by Michigan, New York, Vermont and Washington) or “special trusted” traveler identification cards such as Nexus and Sentri to enter the country by land or sea.

The WHTI will greatly simplify the number of travel documents that immigration officials have to scrutinize. It will also mean that the documents needed to enter the United States will be far harder to counterfeit, alter or obtain by fraud than the documents previously required for entry. This will make it more difficult for criminals, illegal aliens and militants to enter the United States, but it will by no means make it impossible.
An Evolutionary Process

Identity document fraud has existed for as long as identity documents have. Like much sophisticated crime, document fraud has been an evolutionary process. Advancements in document security have been followed by advancements in fraud techniques, which in turn have forced governments to continue to advance their security efforts. In recent years, the advent of color copiers, powerful desktop computers with sophisticated graphics programs and laser printers has propelled this document-fraud arms race into overdrive.

In addition to sophisticated physical security features such as ultraviolet markings and holograms, perhaps the most significant security features of newer identification documents such as passports and visas are that they are machine-readable and linked to a database that can be cross-checked when the document is swiped through a reader at a point of entry. Since 2007, U.S. passports have also incorporated small contactless integrated circuits embedded in the back cover to securely store the information contained on the passport’s photo page. These added security measures have limited the utility of completely counterfeit U.S. passports, which (for the most part) cannot be used to pass through a point of entry equipped with a reader connected to the central database. Such documents are used mostly for traveling abroad rather than for entering the United States.

Likewise, advancements in security features have also made it far more difficult to alter genuine documents by doing things like changing the photo affixed to it (referred to as a photo substitution or “photo sub”). Certainly, there are some very high-end document forgers who can still accomplish this — such as those employed by intelligence agencies — but such operations are very difficult and the documents produced are very expensive.

One of the benefits of the WHTI is that it will now force those wishing to obtain genuine documents by fraud to travel to a higher level — it has, in effect, upped the ante. As STRATFOR has long noted, driver’s licenses pose serious national security vulnerability. Driver’s licenses are, in fact, the closet thing to a U.S. national identity card. However, driver’s licenses are issued by each state, and the process of getting one differs greatly from state to state. Criminals clearly have figured out how to work the system to get fraudulent driver’s licenses. Some states make it easier to get licenses than others and people looking for fraudulent identification flock to those states. Within the states, there are also some department of motor vehicles (DMV) offices — and specific workers — known to be more lenient, and those seeking fraudulent licenses will intentionally visit those offices. In addition to corrupt DMV employees and states that issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, an illegal industry has arisen devoted entirely to producing counterfeit identification documents, compounding the problem.

Birth certificates are also relatively easy to obtain illegally. The relative ease of fraudulently obtaining birth certificates as well as driver’s licenses is seen in federal document-fraud cases (both documents are required to apply for a U.S. passport). In a large majority of the passport-fraud cases worked by Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) special agents, the suspects have successfully obtained fraudulent driver’s licenses and birth certificates, which are submitted in support of a passport application. It is not uncommon for DSS special agents to arrest suspects who possess multiple driver’s licenses in different identities from the same state or even from different states. Such documents could have been used to travel across the U.S. border via land prior to the implementation of the WHTI.
Countermoves

For those able to afford the fees of high-end alien smugglers, who can charge up to $30,000 for a package of identification documents that contains a genuine U.S. passport with genuine supporting documents (birth certificate, social security card and driver’s license), or $10,000 to $15,000 for a genuine U.S. visa (tied to a database, the newer machine-readable visas are very difficult to counterfeit), the WHTI will not make much difference. These high-end document vendors obtain legitimate identification documents by paying corrupt officials who have been carefully cultivated.

That said, the WHTI should succeed in causing the vast majority of criminal aliens, illegal economic immigrants and even militants — people who have not traditionally patronized high-end document vendors — to change the way they enter the United States. Of course, perhaps the simplest way is to take the low road. That is, get to Canada or Mexico and then simply sneak across the border as an undocumented alien — something that hundreds of thousands of people do every year. Once inside the country, such aliens can link up with lower-level document vendors to obtain the driver’s licenses, social security cards and other identity documents they need in order to live, work and travel around the country.

But there are other ways that the WHTI measures can be circumvented. For example, the crush of passport applications the WHTI is now causing will create a distinct vulnerability in the short term. Although the U.S. Department of State has hired a large number of new examiners to process the flood of passport applications it is receiving (and also a number of new DSS special agents to investigate fraud cases), the system is currently overwhelmed by the volume of passport applications.

Historically, passport examiners have had their performance evaluations based on the number of passport applications they process rather than on the number of fraudulent applications they catch (which has long been a source of friction between the DSS and the Bureau of Consular Affairs). This emphasis on numerical quotas has been documented in U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that have noted that the quotas essentially force examiners to take shortcuts in their fraud-detection efforts. As a result, many genuine passports have been issued to people who did not have a legitimate right to them. The current overwhelming flood of passport applications as a result of WHTI, when combined with a batch of new examiners who are rated on numerical quotas, will further enhance this vulnerability. Unless a passport application has an obvious fraud indicator, it will likely slip through the cracks and a fraudulent applicant will receive a genuine U.S. passport.

Stolen passports are another area to consider. In addition to being photo-subbed, which has become more difficult, stolen passports can also be used as travel documents by people who resemble the owner of the document. All the holograms, microprinting and other security features that have been placed on the laminates of passport photo pages tend to make it difficult to clearly see the photo of the passport holder. Also, people change over time, so a person who was issued a passport eight years ago can look substantially different from their passport photo today. The passport process and the laminate can also make it especially difficult to see the facial features of dark-skinned people. This means it is not at all uncommon for a person to be able to impersonate someone and use his or her passport without altering it. This problem persists, even with digital photos being included with the information embedded electronically in the memory chips of newer electronic passports.

Because of these possibilities, stolen passports are worth a tidy sum on the black market. Indeed, shortly after U.S. passports with green covers were issued, they were found to be extremely easy to photo-sub and were soon fetching $7,000 apiece on the black market in places like Jamaica and Haiti. In fact, criminal gangs quickly began offering tourists cash or drugs in exchange for the documents, and the criminal gangs would then turn around and sell them for a profit to document vendors. The problem of U.S. citizens selling their passports also persists today.

On the flip side, many Americans are unaware of the monetary value of their passport — which is several times the $100 they paid to have it issued. They do not realize that when they carry their passport it is like toting around a wad of $100 bills. Tour guides who collect the passports of all the people in their tour group and then keep them in a bag or backpack can end up carrying around tens of thousands of dollars in identification documents — which would make a really nice haul for a petty criminal in the Third World.

But U.S. passports are not the only ones at risk of being stolen. The changes in travel documents required to enter the United States will also place a premium on passports from countries that are included in the U.S. “visa waiver” program — that is, those countries whose citizens can travel to and remain in the United States for up to 90 days without a visa. There are currently 35 countries in the visa waiver program, including EU member states, Australia, Japan and a few others. The risk of theft is especially acute for those countries on the visa waiver list that issue passports that are easier to photo-sub than a U.S. passport. In some visa waiver countries, it is also cheaper and easier to obtain a genuine passport from a corrupt government official than it is in the United States.

While there are efforts currently under way to create an international database to rapidly share data about lost and stolen blank and issued passports, there is generally a time lag before lost and stolen foreign passports are entered into U.S. lookout systems. This lag provides ample time for someone to enter the United States on a photo-subbed passport, and it is not clear if retroactive searches are made once the United States is notified of a stolen passport in order to determine if that passport was used to enter the United States during the lag period. Of course, once a person is inside the United States, it is fairly easy to obtain identification documents in another identity and simply disappear.

There have also been cases of jihadist groups using the passports of militants from visa waiver countries who have died in order to move other operatives into the United States. On Sept. 1, 1992, Ahmed Ajaj and Abdul Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef) arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport. The two men had boarded a flight in Karachi, Pakistan, using photo-subbed passports that had been acquired from deceased jihadists. Ajaj used a Swedish passport in the name Khurram Khan and Basit used a British passport in the name Mohamed Azan.

Ultimately, the WHTI will help close some significant loopholes — especially regarding the use of fraud-prone driver’s licenses and birth certificates for international travel — but the program will not end all document fraud. Document vendors will continue to shift and adjust their efforts to adapt to the WHTI and exploit other vulnerabilities in the system.

Sotomayor so much as a liberal but more so as a leftist

(CNSNews.com) – Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor ruled in January 2009 that states do not have to obey the Second Amendment’s commandment that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In Maloney v. Cuomo, Sotomayor signed an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that said the Second Amendment does not protect individuals from having their right to keep and bear arms restricted by state governments.

The opinion said that the Second Amendment only restricted the federal government from infringing on an individual's right to keep and bear arms. As justification for this position, the opinion cited the 1886 Supreme Court case of Presser v. Illinois.

“It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right,” said the opinion. Quoting Presser, the court said, “it is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.”

The Maloney v. Cuomo case involved James Maloney, who had been arrested for possessing a pair of nunchuks. New York law prohibits the possession of nunchuks, even though they are often used in martial arts training and demonstrations.

The meaning of the Second Amendment has rarely been addressed by the Supreme Court. But in the 2008 case of Heller v. District of Columbia, the high court said that the right to keep and bear arms was a natural right of all Americans and that the Second Amendment guaranteed that right to everyone.

The Second Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled, “guarantee(s) the right of the individual to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.’”

“There seems to us no doubt,” the Supreme Court said, “that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Sotomayor, however, said that even though the Heller decision held that the right to keep and bear arms was a natural right--and therefore could not be justly denied to a law-abiding citizen by any government, federal, state or local--the Second Circuit was still bound by the 1886 case, because Heller only dealt indirectly with the issue before her court.

“And to the extent that Heller might be read to question the continuing validity of this principle, we must follow Presser because where, as here, a Supreme Court precedent has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which [it] directly controls.”

In its 2008 case, the Supreme Court’s took a different view of its own 1886 case, saying that Presser had no bearing on anything beyond a state’s ability to outlaw private militia groups.

“Presser said nothing about the Second Amendment’s meaning or scope, beyond the fact that it does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations,” the court ruled. “This does not refute the individual-rights interpretation of the Amendment.”

The Second Amendment is the only part of the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court has not specifically extended to the states through a process known as incorporation, which involves interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment to read that no state can deprive its citizens of federally guaranteed rights.

The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States … nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Sotomayor’s decision rejected the Fourteenth Amendment’s incorporation doctrine as far as Second Amendment was concerned, saying any legislation that could provide a “conceivable” reason would be upheld by her court.

“We will uphold legislation if we can identify some reasonably conceived state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the legislative action. Legislative acts that do not interfere with fundamental rights … carry with them a strong presumption of constitutionality,” the appeals court concluded. “The Fourteenth Amendment,” she wrote, “provides no relief.”

Sotomayor’s ruling ran to the left of even the reliably liberal San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in the April 2009 case Nordyke v. King that the Second Amendment did, in fact, apply to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, heavily citing the Supreme Court in Heller.

“We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” said the Ninth Circuit court of Appeals. “We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.”

Gun Week Senior Editor Dave Workman told CNSNews.com that the Nordyke and Maloney decisions are at odds and the Supreme Court, possibly with a Justice Sotomayor, may soon sort them out.

“Whenever you have a conflict like this, you’re likely to have it end up before the Supreme Court so they can decide the issue. If the Second Amendment is incorporated into the states, it’s going to jeopardize thousands of local gun laws, and the people who supported those gun laws are just freaked about that.”

Something fishy about Obama's nominee to the Surpreme Court.

Sotomayor Ruled Fish Must Be Protected from Power Plants Regardless of Cost-Benefit Analysis
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
By Matt Cover


In this April 2003 photo released by the American Philosophical Society, judge Sonia Sotomayor receives the official handshake welcoming her into the organization from president Frank H. T. Rhodes in Philadelphia, Pa. President Barack Obama chose federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice on Tuesday, May 26, 2009. (AP Photo/American Philosophical Society, Linda Lloyd)
(CNSNews.com) - Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice David Souter, ruled in a 2007 case that power companies must protect “fish and other aquatic organisms” from being sucked into cooling vents regardless of the costs, saying the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was not allowed to use a cost-benefit analysis in measuring power companies’ compliance with the federal Clean Water Act.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling on April 1 of this year that a cost-benefit analysis was entirely appropriate when judging whether a power company was following the law.

The case involved a section of the Clean Water Act that requires power companies that operate water-cooled power plants--such as nuclear power plants--to use “the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact” to prevent fish and other aquatic life from being sucked into a plants’ cooling vents and killed.

Various environmental groups, including the celebrity-backed National Resources Defense Council, sued the EPA over its application of the best technology standard, arguing that power companies must use the best technology that money can buy to prevent aquatic life from being harmed.

Previously, the EPA had used a cost-benefit analysis in determining what constituted “the best technology available.” It examined the environmental benefits of different technologies against the cost to power companies and the effects of those costs on consumers.

Sotomayor, writing for the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, said that the case was about the fish, ruling that the EPA could only consider whether a power company was able to buy the technology, not whether it made economic sense to do so.

"This case is about fish and other aquatic organisms," wrote Sotomayor. "The flow of water into these plants traps (or 'impinges') large aquatic organisms against grills or screens, which cover the intake structures, and draws (or 'entrains') small aquatic organisms into the cooling mechanism; the resulting impingement and entrainment from these operations kill or injure billions of aquatic organisms every year.

"In determining BAT (Best Available Technology), by contrast, the EPA may consider cost as a factor to a limited degree, but only as to whether the cost of a given technology could be reasonably borne by the industry and not the relation between that technology’s cost and the benefits it achieves," Sotomayor concluded.

The EPA, she said, must first consider whether the industry could “reasonably” bear the cost of new technology and then conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis--which measures which technology meets the EPA requirements the cheapest, not which technology is most economical to install.

"EPA may permissibly consider cost in two ways: (1) to determine what technology can be ‘reasonably borne’ by the industry and (2) to engage in cost-effectiveness analysis in determining BAT,” wrote Sotomayor.

Cost, which gets passed on to customers as rate increases, can only be considered for technologies that meet EPA goals, rather than what effect it might have on the abilities of the power companies to produce electricity.

"Thus, the EPA must first determine what is the most effective technology that may reasonably be borne by the industry,” Sotomayor explained. “Once this determination has been made, the EPA may then consider other factors, including cost-effectiveness, to choose a less expensive technology that achieves essentially the same results.”

The Supreme Court disagreed. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court that a cost-benefit analysis was entirely reasonable and that a cost-benefit analysis could be used to determine what is the “best available technology.”

“But ‘best technology’ may also describe the technology that most efficiently produces some good,” wrote Justice Scalia. “It seems to us, therefore, that the phrase ‘best technology available’ … does not unambiguously preclude cost-benefit analysis.”

The Supreme Court ruled that Sotomayor was in error and that the EPA could continue using a cost-benefit analysis when enforcing environmental regulations.

“We conclude that the EPA permissibly relied on cost-benefit analysis in setting the national performance standards,” Scalia wrote. “The Court of Appeals,” Scalia ruled, “was therefore in error.”

Steve Milloy, a lawyer, author, and founder of JunkScience.com, told CNSNews.com that Sotomayor’s decision was pure politics, saying it reflected Judge Sotomayor’s “blind political allegiance” to radical environmentalists.

“This was ultimately a political job, where a narrow interpretation of the law is going to help or be consistent with her politics--that’s what she’s going to do,” said Milloy. “Where a more expansive view is going to help with her politics, she’s going to adopt that. She’s going to find a way to side with whatever her political views are, regardless of the law.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the law or the environment,” said Milloy. “These are all political jobs now. I can only describe that [ruling] as blind political allegiance to the Greens.”

Contraditions persist in the Obama administration continuing signs that it is lost.

Wait a minute Obama said he wanted people to go out and spend their stimulus money, On top of that he started to change his rhertoric and change that of those around him namely Timothy Geitner who says the economy has bottomed out and begun to recover.

Now Rham Immanuels brother is suggesting we go Euro and place a value tax on everything from a head of lettuce to your medical and savings plan at work.

Suggestions are that this tax could be given back as the main funding for the newly intended national health care project Obama is so aggressively proposing to simply leveling or at least bringing down Obama's creative bankruptcy of our national economic growth for the next 30 years.

Here where I am troubled.

An article in todays WAPO says this and I quote." It punishes spending rather than savings, which the administration hopes to encourage. And the threat of a VAT could pull the country out of recession, some economists argue, by hurrying consumers to the mall before the tax hits."

Hey that ain't what the president said!! He said he wanted the country to go out there and begin to spend again!!.

A simple observation of how things have gone in the past in this country tells me that if a VAT tax were imposed it would hurt the poor the most.

Statistically this is just a matter of fact. There are more poor than middle class or rich who use the majority of the self abuse items that would be generating a large portion of this tax. Vat would be increasing everyone's taxes especially the poor which Obama said he would not do.

And finally congress would not be able to keep their hands off of this money seeing to it that it be used where most importantly it would do the most good, like reducing the national debt period. But instead they would steal it for whatever pet projects they so saw fit and it would become incorporated into our wild spending frenzy eventually leading to more debt.

Hmm business as usual Democrat style. What scares me the most is these guys are revealing that in truth they really don't have a clue as to how serious things are nor did they come into office with a real plan on how to turn things around.

They simply had a leftist agenda which they intend to impose no matter how deep into depression this country is headed. These my friends are clearly the workings of a totalitarian style of government in the making.

Here is the full article here.Vat Tax

Paper Money Part II, continued from May 26,

Paper money and the Constitution

A Study of Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 reveals a fascinating obsession on the part of the Framers with paper money. Amazingly, proposed legislative schemes, philosophies of representation, and existing political arrangements were all judged good or bad almost solely on whether they were likely to lead to or had already led to the creation of paper money. On page after page of the Notes we find that paper money is the overriding, all-important litmus test for analyzing the compositions and powers of state legislatures, the courts, and internal police; determining the rules of a quorum; and debating the proposed federal veto on state law.

Virtually every time the Framers sought to find an example of something “wicked” to be avoided, something they wished the Constitution to repress, some terrible failing of the state government or the Articles of Confederation, they turned to paper money. Mention of the rights with which we are today so obsessed, and those most commonly associated with the Framers, are conspicuous only in their absence.

1. Why is a large republic, spread over a great area, encompassing a multitude of various political interests a good thing? Because, as Madison notes in Federalist No. 10, “[A] rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union, than a particular member of it....”

2. Who should select U.S. senators and congressmen, the people or their state legislatures? Charles Pinkney, South Carolina delegate to the Convention, favored the legislatures because “the people in South Carolina were notoriously for paper money” while the legislature had rejected the idea.

3. Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts delegate to the Convention, likewise favored the legislatures, because “the people are for paper money when the Legislatures are against it.”

4. Should the federal government have the power to veto state laws that offend the Constitution? Here again, paper money is the litmus test. Elbridge Gerry was generally against it, but, “He had no objection to authorize a negative to paper money and similar measures.” Madison also was for the veto power, pointing to the fate of the Rhode Island judges who had refused to uphold the constitutionality of paper money laws and noting that the newly selected judges would be “willing instruments of the wicked and arbitrary plans of their masters.”

5. Every American knows of the need for “checks and balances,” though few could name paper money as one of the evils to be checked. According to Alexander Hamilton, a lack of such checks in the state governments had led to “our paper money, installment laws, et cetera.”

6. Should the federal government have the power to “interfere” with the state governments in matters of “internal police”? According to Gouverneur Morris, Pennsylvania delegate to the Convention, the internal police “ought to be infringed in many cases, as in the case of paper money and other tricks by which Citizens of other states may be affected.”

7. Setting a quorum in the House and Senate at less than a majority of members might be a good thing. George Mason, after all, “had known a paper emission prevented by that cause in Virginia.”

8. “Proper elections” were better left to the people, if divided into large districts, than by state legislatures, thought George Mason. After all, “Paper money had been issued by the latter when the former were against it.”

Restricting the states

So what did the Framers do to rectify this situation? Where is the constitutional salvation from the evil of paper money? Relief lies in Article I, Section X. It is in Section X that we find the relatively few things that state governments may not do. Many Americans do not realize that at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, it applied only to the federal government. In other words, until after the Constitution was amended following the Civil War, the states had absolute power to engage in censorship, regulate the press, suppress free speech, or even establish a state-supported church, which, in fact, many of the states actually did. At the time of the Revolution, for example, most of the colonies had tax-supported churches; all except Rhode Island imposed legal restrictions on various sects and “penalties for dissenters, apostates, blasphemers and idolators were numerous and severe.” (Novus Ordo Seclorum, The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, by Forrest McDonald.)

In short, for the states, the entirety of the Bill of Rights was a nonentity. While the Framers certainly could have attempted to impose bill-of-rights-type restrictions on the states, they did not. It is instructive, then, to see just what state restrictions the Framers actually did write into the Constitution.

The Constitution expressly prohibited the states from such things as continuing to act as separate nations with treaty-making powers, engaging in war, floating a navy, and establishing tariffs. But the most significant checks on state authority, and the only checks that involved the rights and liberties of citizens, were those that would no longer allow the states to “emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts....” In other words, no more paper money and no more voiding of contracts with stay laws or tender laws.

The prohibition of ex post facto laws was instituted for the same reason, for, as previously noted, most of the legislation passed to support paper money was made to retroactively affect existing contracts, a perfect example of an ex post facto law. Bills of attainder were legislative findings of guilt (no judge, jury, or trial) for various crimes, which usually resulted in forfeiture of landed estates. These bills had been unjustly employed to seize Tory properties during the Revolution; but with infringements of property rights becoming more and more common with every passing day, the Framers feared that they could be used against the creditor class at any time.

It is very likely impossible to understand the Constitution without first understanding the importance of Article I, Section X: of all the dozens upon dozens of rights that the Framers could have attempted to prohibit states from infringing, the property rights of the minority were the only ones to make the list. Remember, the federal government could not prohibit free speech, establish or handicap a religion, or regulate the press. The states, however, (again, because the Bill of Rights did not apply to them) could do all of those things. Property rights, then, were the only rights to be protected from both federal and state action.

For those who read of the Framers and their obsession with property rights and paper money and who are tempted to look with scorn on those men for having such a monomaniacal focus on something not so high, not so enlightened or elevated, a harder look at history, a more down-to-earth approach might be necessary.

The Framers saw the entire history of government for what it was: one long, sad saga in which those in power — be they the king, aristocrat, or oligarch, the many, the few, or the one — trampled the rights of those without power. Human beings being what we are, the oppression would take a multitude of forms, but the oppression of property is almost always the first and favorite of oppressions. Anti-majoritarian measures aside, the common man, the people, the majority wielded the power under the new Constitution. History, political theory, and the contemporaneous paper-money crisis all demonstrated that a government of the people would be no different from governments throughout history. It would live down to expectations, and those in power, the numerous poor, would oppress the property rights of others. The Framers wrote the Constitution, then, to safeguard against the chief defect of democratic representative government — the oppression of the wealthy minority by the poor majority.

Rick Lynch is an author living in Virginia. He is finishing a book on constitutional issues entitled They Are vicious

If China can lower plastic bag usage by 40% why not the U.S.?

With four times the population of the United States, China shows progress in pollution control.

One year after plastic bag ban, how is China doing?

BEIJING, May 26 (Xinhua) -- Standing beside a cashier's counter, with both hands full with goods she bought in Carrefour, Zhao Shaojuan realized that she forgot to bring a bag with her.

Just a year before, all shopping malls, supermarkets and open markets in Beijing provided free plastic bags. The 66-year-old Zhao still finds it hard to adopt to taking a bag when shopping.

"But I will try to bring a bag next time," said the retired high school teacher.

Chen Gang, a 30-year-old office worker, said that he is used to taking a bag when he goes to supermarkets.

Almost a year ago, on June 1, 2008, China banned supermarkets, shops and open markets from supplying free plastic bags to customers, in a drive to protect environment and cut waste.

So what has happened in the past year?

On Monday afternoon, a Xinhua report watched 100 customers and found 24 bought plastic bags in a Wal-Mart in southern Beijing.

Statistics from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) showed that the 106 outlets of Wal-Mart China had reduced plastic bag usage by 80 percent in the past year.

The number of plastic bags used in supermarkets was lowered by 40 billion, or 66 percent, said the NDRC.

Xie Zhenhua, NDRC deputy director, gave a more vivid example: all the plastic bags saved in one year equal 1.6 million tonnes of petroleum.

He explained that plastic bags take about 200 years to decompose and they greatly contaminate soil and water sources. If they end up in rivers and the sea, they may lead to the deaths of fish, animals and plants.

However, shopkeepers in open markets and commune groceries still provide free plastic bags, for fear that otherwise, no customer will patronize their business.

For Zhan Nan, a cashier in Wal-Mart, it is easy to live without plastic bags.

"People may feel inconvenient at first, but they will become easy without plastic bags, it's just a problem of habit."

Supermarkets in Beijing including Carrefour and Wal-Mart have encouraged customers to use reusable shopping bags, which hang above every cashier's counter.

The plastic bag ban is only a part of the government drive for environment protection, which has included developing clean energy, and lowering carbon emissions.

China has allocated 21 million yuan (about 3.1 million U.S. dollars), about 5.25 percent of its four-trillion economic stimulus package, into energy saving and ecological construction.

The State Administration of Industry and Commerce issued a regulation that any shopkeeper who provides free plastic bags to customers will receive a 10,000 yuan fine. However, only very few people receive fine in Beijing.

It's hard work to persuade 1.3 billion people to give up plastic bags, said Shi Pengxiang, a project manager of Greenpeace China.

"But more important, we have made a start," said Shi.

Paper Money and the Constitution, Part I

Reprinted and borrowed from unknown source
Part 1 of 2 parts, to be printed May 26, and May 27


Why do we have a Constitution? How and why did it come into existence? Just what, exactly, prompted the calling of the Constitutional Convention, which gave birth to it? Most Americans believe, logically enough, that with the passing of the British from the scene it was simply time to create a new government to take the place of the old. That notion, however, ignores the facts that Americans already had a functioning government at the time of the Convention and that that government had been in effect for six years following the final British defeat at Yorktown.

No, the overthrow of the old government and the establishment of the new were prompted by an internal tumult, by domestic corruption, oppression, and chaos, all but forgotten today, that had nothing to do with the departure of the British. That crisis revolved around the printing of paper money by some of the newly freed states. As the Federal Farmer, one of the Anti-Federalists, stated in opposition to the Constitution,

Our governments have been new and unsettled; and several legislatures, by making tender, suspension, and paper money laws, have given just cause of uneasiness to creditors. By these and other causes, several orders of men in the community have been prepared, by degrees, for a change of government; and this very abuse of power in the legislatures, which, in some cases, has been charged upon the democratic part of the community, has furnished aristocratical men with those very weapons, and those very means, with which, in great measure, they are rapidly effecting their favourite object.... The conduct of several legislatures, touching paper money, and tender laws, has prepared many honest men for changes in government, which otherwise they would not have thought of.... [Emphasis added.]

It is vital, first, to see the printing of paper money for what it was — a welfare scheme and an erosion of property rights enacted by impoverished majorities with the sole intent of taking money (property) from the creditor class. It is no exaggeration, no stretch of the imagination, no revisionist or wild-eyed conspiracy theory to state that the Constitution of the United States of America came into being, more than any other reason, to crush a welfare program, to stop the poor from ganging up on the rich and, endowed with the power of democracy, stealing their money.

In their book Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787, Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier state,

What concerned Madison most in “Vices” was not only that the states were flouting national regulations, but that they were treating unjustly certain minorities within their own borders.... Madison was especially troubled by the stay laws and tender laws and the paper money that so many of the plain people of the country were clamoring for. These laws, Madison believed, were “oppressing” the creditor minority. [Emphasis added.]

Edward J. Larson and Michael P. Winship stated in The Constitutional Convention,

In several state legislatures, a new breed of politicians, often from lower social backgrounds, was passing debt-relief measures, most notoriously by issuing inflationary paper money. Such legislative action, Madison believed, was an attack on the rights of creditors and amounted to the few being plundered by the many.

The story of paper money is a simple one of greed and corruption fueled by the power of unchecked democracy degenerating into oppression and turmoil. For the Framers, the paper-money crisis was the manifestation of all their fears of mob rule followed by chaos, and it was paper money, far more than anything else, that prompted them to convene the assembly that gave birth to the Constitution. Yes, there were other issues and concerns, chiefly the tendency of the states to strangle interstate trade, and the fear that 13 separate states would constantly war with each other, much like the European powers, or be weak in the face of foreign attack; but, other than the trade issue, those things were merely theoretical in nature, while paper money was all too real.

As you read of paper money, you might wonder just exactly what all the fuss was about. After all, in 21st-century America, when debt-relief measures to the detriment of creditors are this very hour in front of Congress; when battling over which legislator gets the biggest share of your paycheck for distribution to his constituents is all government seems to do; and when there’s a welfare program for virtually every ill that can be imagined by even the most creative among us, — I recently read of the California legislator who has secured funds to pay for tattoo removal because tattoos might hurt a job applicant’s chance of getting hired — just exactly what physical form state-issued money takes might not seem to be the kind of thing over which to change governments. But if the paper-money shenanigans outlined below seem rather tame to the modern American reader, that just goes to show how very far we’ve fallen from the days when the Framers had “an almost religious respect” for property rights.

Paper money and the Articles of Confederation

Paper-money schemes could not stand on their own and necessarily spawned a whole series of additional laws, each one more odious than its predecessor, to prop up the whole corrupt edifice. Property rights aside, the Framers believed that the baneful effects of all the legislative chaos, the internal turmoil, and the international ridicule and disrepute generated threatened the very existence of the nation.

So frightening was the specter of paper money that one Convention delegate said that granting the federal government the power to issue it “would be as alarming as the mark of the Beast in Revelation.” Another delegate said he would “rather reject the whole” Constitution than see the federal government granted that power.

The paper-money crisis began when debtors, usually farmers struggling to make loan payments, would turn to their state legislatures and push for the creation of paper money. That was welfare pure and simple, as the paper money had nowhere near the worth of the gold, silver, or other medium of payment specified in original loan documents, and that, of course, was exactly the idea behind the legislation. Debtors also forced the creation of such extraordinary measures as “stay laws,” which postponed or even canceled debt collection. Then there were the awful “tender laws,” and “ex post facto laws,” which actually compelled unwilling creditors to accept the newly printed paper money regardless of what the preexisting contract specified. Printing paper money was one thing, but to actually nullify preexisting contracts and force creditors to accept it in payment was simply more than the Framers could tolerate.

But it was the example of Rhode Island that most horrified the Framers. The legislature, dominated by indebted farmers, circulated paper money that creditors naturally refused to accept. The legislature then made acceptance mandatory. Many creditors at this point actually fled the state to avoid the dreaded paper. The government’s answer was simply to pass more corrupt legislation, this time allowing debtors to legally discharge the debt by depositing money with courts and posting an advertisement attesting to such in newspapers. Things got nastier still. When Rhode Island’s supreme court declared the paper-money law unconstitutional, the legislature threw the court out of office and replaced the justices...... continued tomorrow.

To the true heroes those who have passed on and those who are still with us.. We salute you!

Lost Heroes of the War on Terror: Gallant Deeds and Untold Tales

Posted By Jeff Emanuel Cross posted from Pajama's Media

Despite taking place in the Information Age, very few of the heroic exploits of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines since September 11, 2001, have made their way into the living rooms of ordinary Americans — at least in any lasting way.

Whether this is the result of changing values among the American people, the general population’s perpetually dwindling attention span, or because there are so many things closer to home our nation is choosing to focus on instead of our service men and women’s gallant deeds and efforts (whether that be a rocky national economy or the latest season of American Idol), the fact is this generation has failed to identify and treasure its incarnations of historic military heroes like [1] Audie Murphy, [2] Jimmy Doolittle, [3] Pappy Boyington, [4] Bill Pitsenbarger, [5] Bud Day, and countless others.

This disappointing reality is not unique to the current decade. Who, for example, can name the most recent pre-global war on terror (GWOT) recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor? The names of Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon — two Army special operations sergeants who received the nation’s highest award for their heroic actions in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 — are utterly foreign to the vast majority of the same American population that can name the latest movie star to file for divorce, the latest starlet to have borne a child out of wedlock, or the latest teen sensation to enter alcohol rehab.

Part of the problem is a lack of reporting on stories of true heroism among the men and women serving this country in war zones around the world. After all, how can people know of the deeds being done by our best and brightest if the news media — whose sole raison d’être is to report on deeds and events — doesn’t the job it exists to do?

This lack of reporting on American military heroism isn’t due to a lack of media access to the military in any form. On the contrary, Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom have begun a new era of access for journalists who desire to observe firsthand coalition military operations abroad, on the front lines, or in the rear, as part of the Department of Defense’s media embed program.

The ability to embed with coalition troops and report from the battlefront has spawned a new generation of independent combat journalists. Intrepid individuals — often veterans — like Michael Yon, J.D. Johannes, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio, Pat Dollard, and Bill Ardolino have followed in the footsteps of legendary World War II reporter Ernie Pyle, giving generously of their time and resources to travel to and within the combat zones that make up the many fronts of the global war on terror, for the dual purpose of accurately reporting on events (something so many media outlets have demonstrated time and again that they are incapable of doing) and of telling stories that simply would not make it back to the American people any other way.

However, a mere handful of individuals cannot, by themselves, provide a nation with enough of that which it so desperately needs in this age of ephemeral pleasures and doom-and-gloom news reports: true stories of courage and sacrifice, bravery, and gallantry shown by our fighting men and women around the world on a daily basis.

In reality, there have been countless cases of exceptional courage under fire to this point in the war on terror, and there will doubtless be many more before this generational conflict has drawn to a close.

It is cliché (but entirely accurate) to say that every man and woman fighting for America deserves respect and acknowledgment. It is also accurate, though, that there are some who go above and beyond even the bravery and valor shown by the “average” soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine who puts his or her life on the line, day in and day out, in defense of America and in pursuit of our nation’s goals, safety, and interests.

Names like [6] Eric Moser and Chris Corriveau, two paratroopers who stood shoulder-to-shoulder against dozens of al-Qaeda fighters on a rooftop in Iraq, fighting for their lives and for their country’s honor; [7] Zach Rhyner, an Air Force combat controller who saved the lives of dozens of American special forces soldiers through his quick, effective actions in the middle of an overwhelming Taliban ambush; and [8] Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL who leapt onto an enemy grenade, sacrificing himself to save the lives of his teammates despite the fact he was the only person who could have escaped the blast with his life, are far more deserving of remembrance than are the pop idols with which our nation has filled the place formerly reserved for such true heroes as these.

This is far too brief a space to recount even a fraction of the total number of heroic stories that deserve remembrance and celebration on this Memorial Day and every day hereafter. So I will today limit myself to presenting a selection of four exceptional warriors — one from each branch of service — whose names and deeds every American should know. These stories alone do not even begin to break the surface of the reservoir of deeds those fighting for our nation have carried out. However, each of these men is a true hero in every sense of the word, having fought in defense of America and having made the ultimate sacrifice for his mission and for his fellow men.

Michael P. Murphy, United States Navy

Michael P. Murphy, a native of Smithtown, New York, had a passion for history and a desire to do great things. While attending Penn State University, Murphy — or “Murph,” as he was known — became interested in joining the Navy SEALs, the U.S. Navy’s elite sea-air-land commando group.

Upon graduating from college, Murphy declined to attend the several law schools to which he was accepted, opting instead for Officer Candidate School and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in Coronado, California.

In April, 2005 his SEAL Delivery Vehicle team was deployed to Afghanistan — a trip from which the young lieutenant would never return.

On June 28 of that year, Murphy was leading a four-man SEAL squad in Kunar Province, in remote eastern Afghanistan, when his team came into contact with three goat herders. After weighing their options, Murphy and his men decided to release the three civilians unharmed. This humane move would end up being costly, as the Afghans immediately went to the local Taliban leadership and reported the SEALs’ presence.

As Murphy’s small team moved onto a sheer mountainside, forty Taliban fighters ambushed them, pinning them down under withering fire. All four SEALs were immediately wounded, with the squad’s radio operator taking a bullet to the hand as he tried to make a radio call to the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) at Bagram Air Base.

Recognizing the necessity of making contact with a supporting force, and that it would be impossible to do so in the ravine the four SEALs were being forced into by the overwhelming enemy force, Murphy dashed into the open, exposing himself to greater enemy fire in exchange for a clearer transmission signal.

Murphy managed to reach the QRF and provided his team’s position and status while taking and returning fire, despite being hit in the back by an enemy round. A special operations helicopter arrived on the scene shortly, only to be downed by a Taliban-fired rocket propelled grenade. The aircraft crashed, killing all 16 SEALs and Army special operations aviators aboard.

Nearly out of ammunition and with their rescuers having been killed, Murphy and his fellow SEALs continued to fight until they had repelled the Taliban ambush — an action that cost three of the four their lives. By the end of that two-hour battle, Murphy and two of his SEALs were dead. However, their actions allowed the fourth member of their team, a SEAL named Marcus Luttrell, to survive the battle and to evade enemy capture until being rescued by U.S. forces four days later.

“By his undaunted courage, intrepid fighting spirit and inspirational devotion to his men in the face of certain death,” says the official Navy report of the incident, “Lt. Murphy was able to relay the position of his unit, an act that ultimately led to the rescue of Luttrell and the recovery of the remains of the three who were killed in the battle.

On October 22, 2007, Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor, by President Bush, who presented the award to Murphy’s parents and brother in a White House ceremony.

According to the Medal’s citation, Murphy’s willingness to “gallantly give his life for his country and for the cause of freedom” in a remote corner of Afghanistan exemplified “selfless leadership, courageous actions, and extraordinary devotion to duty.” It demonstrated all of this indeed — as well as a devotion to his brothers in arms, whom he died both saving and trying to save.

Jason Dunham, United States Marine Corps


Jason Dunham, of Scio, New York, was killed in Iraq in 2004, at the age of 23. Had Dunham not given his life for his comrades nearly five years ago, he would have turned 28 last fall on the very day the U.S. Marine Corps, which has been fortunate beyond measure to have contained men of Dunham’s quality for over two centuries, turned 233.

Dunham’s death in Iraq is not in itself what makes his a story of heroism, though. Rather, it is his final actions, stunning in their selflessness, which deserve to be known and remembered. According to the Marines’ official report:

On April 14, 2004, Corporal Dunham heroically saved the lives of two of his fellow Marines by jumping on a grenade during an ambush in the town of Karabilah.

When a nearby Marine convoy was ambushed, Corporal Dunham led his squad to the site of the attack, where he and his men stopped a convoy of cars trying to make an escape. As he moved to search one of the vehicles, an insurgent jumped out and grabbed the corporal by the throat.

The corporal engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. At one point, he shouted to his fellow Marines, “No! No! No! Watch his hand!”

Moments later, an enemy grenade rolled out and Corporal Dunham jumped on the grenade to protect his fellow Marines, using his helmet and body to absorb the blast. Corporal Dunham succumbed to his wounds on April 22, 2004.

At the time of the battle in question, Lance Corporal Mark Edward Dean, a close friend of Dunham’s,

didn’t recognize the wounded Marine being loaded into the back of his Humvee. Blood from shrapnel wounds in the Marine’s head and neck had covered his face. Then Lance Cpl. Dean spotted the tattoo on his chest — an Ace of Spades and a skull — and realized he was looking at one of his closest friends, Cpl. Dunham. A volunteer firefighter back home in Owasso, Okla., Lance Cpl. Dean says he knew from his experience with car wrecks that his friend had a better chance of surviving if he stayed calm.

“You’re going to be all right,” Lance Cpl. Dean recalled saying to Dunham as the Humvee raced against the inevitability of time and mortal wounds on a doomed quest to save the life of a brave Marine whose selfless act had just saved the lives of his comrades.

“We’re going to get you home.”

The situation was eerily familiar to Dean, who recalled Dunham’s words to him and their comrades while on a trip to Las Vegas shortly before leaving the U.S. for Iraq. Dunham told them that he was planning to extend his enlistment and stay in Iraq for the battalion’s entire tour. “You’re crazy for extending,” Lance Cpl. Dean said. “Why?”

Cpl. Dunham responded: “I want to make sure everyone makes it home alive. I want to be sure you go home to your wife alive.”

And he did just that.

Dunham’s parents accepted his posthumously-awarded Medal of Honor from President Bush in a ceremony at the White House on January 11, 2007.

Ross McGinnis, United States Army

When most young men are turning 17, they are thinking about their upcoming senior year of high school, their sports career, or their choice of college. When Ross McGinnis of Knox, Pennsylvania, turned 17, he walked straight down to the recruiter’s office and joined the Army via the delayed enlistment program.

By the age of 18, the ambidextrous McGinnis was in training to be an infantryman, where he qualified as a sharpshooter with both his left and right hands. Shortly thereafter, he was assigned to Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, based in Schweinfurt, Germany, where he was the youngest soldier in the unit.

In August 2006, he found himself in Iraq, where he distinguished himself so greatly in his first three months that a waiver was requested — and granted — to promote him to Specialist (E-4) despite his lacking the requisite time in service.

On December 4 of that year, at the age of 19, Ross McGinnis [9] traded his life for the lives of four members of his squad when he jumped on a grenade and shielded them from the blast.

On the last day of his life, Private McGinnis was manning the .50-caliber machine gun mounted in a turret atop his Humvee and serving as the rear guard in a mounted combat patrol against insurgents and sectarian fighters. As the convoy made a turn onto a narrow street, a fragmentation grenade was thrown from the rooftop of an adjacent building. According to the official report:

[McGinnis] immediately yelled “Grenade!” on the vehicle’s intercom system to alert the four other members of his crew…[he] made an attempt to personally deflect the grenade, but was unable to prevent it from falling through the gunner’s hatch.

According to platoon sergeant Cedric Thomas, who was commanding the vehicle, “McGinnis yelled ‘Grenade. … It’s in the truck!’… I looked out of the corner of my eye as I was crouching down and I saw him pin it down.”

“He had time to jump out of the truck. He chose not to.”

Instead, according to his award citation,

[R]ather than leaping from the gunner’s hatch to safety, Private McGinnis made the courageous decision to protect his crew. In a selfless act of bravery, in which he was mortally wounded, Private McGinnis covered the live grenade, pinning it between his body and the vehicle and absorbing most of the explosion.

Private McGinnis’ gallant action,…extraordinary heroism and selflessness at the cost of his own life … directly saved four men from certain serious injury or death.

For his actions, McGinnis was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest award for combat heroism. On June 2, 2008, that award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

According to a later [10] report, “Thomas remembered McGinnis talking about how he would respond in such a situation. McGinnis said then he didn’t know how he would act, but when the time came, he delivered.”

“He gave his life to save his crew,” Thomas said. “He’s a hero. He’s a professional. He was just an awesome guy.”

Jason Cunningham, United States Air Force

Jason Cunningham of Carlsbad, New Mexico, joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 19, but he didn’t stay long. After just under four years in the fleet, Cunningham decided on a radical career change, setting his sights on joining an elite Air Force fraternity known as Pararescuemen (or PJs). The Air Force has fewer than 1,000 of these highly trained professionals whose job is to deploy by any means necessary — sea, air, or land — to rescue downed aircrew members and injured special operators.

After two years of selection and training, Cunningham succeeded in his goal of becoming a PJ and was assigned to the 38th Rescue Squadron at Moody AFB, Georgia. Only eight months later, he deployed to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The PJs there were based in an air operations building that also housed a forward surgical team — a training opportunity he took advantage of almost immediately.

“Every time we had a casualty event [Cunningham] was always the first one here offering to help,” said Dr. (Maj.) Brian Burlingame, the surgical unit’s commander. “His enthusiasm was just genuine to the core, which was what endeared him to us. He was like a little brother.”

“He had more motivation than any one man should have,” said a Pararescue colleague. “He was all about saving people’s lives.”

Besides honing his personal medical skills, Cunningham’s involvement with the surgeons down the hall at Bagram directly resulted in a development that would save the lives of American soldiers in the very near future: the allowing of PJs to carry whole blood into combat as a part of their medical loadout. This was a controversial step, Dr. Burlingame told the Air Force Times:

“Blood is an FDA-controlled substance. It’s very, very regulated.” Special training, not to mention lots of paperwork, is required before medics are considered qualified to administer blood in the field. After Cunningham and Burlingame started talking, all the pararescuers here took the classes and filled out the paperwork.

“We then pushed blood forward with [Cunningham's] group,” Burlingame said.

Perhaps the most famous battle of the first years of Operation Enduring Freedom, the battle of “Roberts Ridge” (a subset of Operation Anaconda, which saw a loss of life unprecedented in the special operations community since Mogadishu in 1993, and surpassed since only by the operation Lt. Michael P. Murphy, noted above, was a part of), was Cunningham’s first — and last — taste of combat. At the scene, Navy SEAL Neil Roberts fell out of an MH-47 Chinook helicopter which was taking heavy fire while attempting to insert Roberts’ team onto a hilltop to watch over the Anaconda battlefield. A second helicopter had deposited the remainder of Roberts’ squad and an Air Force combat controller (Tech. Sgt. John Chapman, whose actions during the battle cost him his life, and earned him a posthumous Air Force Cross) on the hilltop in an attempt to rescue the fallen sailor, whom Predator UAV footage had shown being captured by Taliban fighters.

A quick reaction force (QRF) composed mainly of a squad of Army Rangers was launched to reinforce the outmanned and outgunned Americans who had quickly become pinned down in an exposed position. As it approached the landing zone, the QRF helicopter came under such significant ground fire that it was forced to make a crash landing in an exposed area of the hilltop, only 100 meters from a fortified enemy position. The soldiers on board immediately took fire, and casualties began to mount instantly.

Cunningham worked feverishly to treat the wounded Rangers and aviators, doing so in the back of the downed Chinook helicopter until it caught fire and became the target of increasingly accurate enemy mortar fire. Making the decision to move his patients, Cunningham crossed the line of fire seven separate times while successfully transporting them to higher ground. He then was forced to move them twice more to avoid the enemy fire raining down on their static, vulnerable casualty collection-points.

Finally, just after midnight, after having so successfully defied enemy fire so as to move and treat his patients, Cunningham’s luck ran out, and he was shot in the abdomen just below his protective vest. According to the Air Force Times:

Cunningham must have known he was in serious trouble. But despite his worsening condition, he continued to treat patients and advise others on how to care for the critically wounded. One of the two blood packs he had brought [and which he was directly responsible for PJs being able to carry] saved a badly wounded Ranger. The medics gave the other packet to Cunningham himself, whose life was slowly flowing out in a red stream onto the white snow.

Nearly 20 hours after suffering serious internal injuries, and not long before the area became cold enough for rescue helicopters to arrive and evacuate the wounded fighters, Cunningham succumbed to his wounds. He treated patients to the end, and was credited afterward with having almost single-handedly made sure that only seven men died, rather than seventeen. Such dedication and seriousness of purpose ended up costing him his own life.

Every wounded man he treated survived the encounter, and for his extraordinary heroism and gallant action in living the Pararescue motto (”That Others May Live”), he was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross, the second-highest award that the USAF offers. According to the citation, “As a result of [Cunningham's] extraordinary heroism, his team returned 10 seriously wounded personnel to life-saving medical care.”

“He was right in the thick of it, doing it right up to the end,” said a fellow PJ. “Jason was right where every PJ wants to be. He was where guys needed him, and he was saving lives.”

No Greater Love …

These four men exemplify a mindset that is both incomprehensible and unimaginable to all who have not been in such a situation. When faced with a life or death situation, with an escape route both simple and available, every one of them chose death, against every instinct of self-preservation. And, in doing so, they allowed the men with them, marked for death, to keep their lives.

There truly can be no greater love, no more heroic acts, than such as these. The men whose lives were saved by the direct intervention of Danny Dietz, Jason Dunham, Ross McGinnis, Jason Cunningham, and others will carry the burden of gratitude with them to the grave, and beyond.

The mindset that compels a man to put himself into harm’s way for the purpose of saving another is impossible to express; however, it is a defining characteristic of the true warrior who has faced combat and who has experienced the reality of having his life entirely in the hands of the men next to him and having each of theirs in his.

As put by Dr. Joseph Blake, a sociologist who has researched the act of soldiers throwing themselves on grenades and other acts of sacrifice in the line of fire, “A combat situation has not a whole lot to do with patriotism or the folks back home. … They are fighting for their buddies. They don’t want to let their buddies down.”

Yet these heroes, and all of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who have died in combat, have done so also, if indirectly, for the sake of all Americans. To these men and women, every American owes eternal gratitude and a commitment never to take for granted those things that we, due to their sacrifices, can continue to enjoy — things that they, due to those same sacrifices, will never again be able to.

On this Memorial Day, take a moment to thank a friend, family member, or even a total stranger who has served — or is serving — this country. For though they will never seek the praise and thanks of their fellow man, all will appreciate the expression of gratitude.

It is our solemn duty to honor those who have kept us safe and free for the past 232-plus years. America has stood strong all this time largely because of men like these. And it is because of men like them that it shall remain so.

The sacrifices of these true warriors, like those of the countless others whose stories have not yet been told to a public, did not make them heroes. It simply demonstrated what heroes they were all along.

Now it is up to us to remember them.

A Day of Rememberance

Thank You Right Wing News for putting into words what I feel as a veteran. This weekend always brings out the emotional side of me more than any other American celebration. I need not say more.

Cross posted from Right Wing news.

Memorial Day 2009

During the Milblogger's conference in Washington DC, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to watch the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It's a ceremony that happens every half hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is a somber reminder of the sacrifice many have made in the service of this nation.

As I was leaving Arlington I ran into a young man with his wife and new baby walking along one of the paths. He had a 101st Airborne Division tattoo and I naturally engaged him in conversation, asking which unit he'd served with and when he'd been in Iraq. We talked for a moment while his wife and child stood by and then, as I began to leave, I thanked him for his service and welcomed him home.

He sort of ducked his head for a second and then looked at me and shyly said, "thank you too". I smiled. He ducked his head again and glanced at his family. Then, looking me straight in the eye, but in a voice that was lower so only I could hear he said, "I have some friends here I need to say goodbye too". He said it knowing I'd understand. I nodded in answer, reached out and put my hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. We parted, he with his family and me with my thoughts.

What that young soldier was doing is what Memorial Day is all about. And our chance meeting drove that simple point home to me as nothing has before. Memorial Day is about remembering those in the military who made the ultimate sacrifice. General John J Pershing once said of that sacrifice that "time will never dim the glory of their deeds". But unless we make a real effort to remember those who have fallen, they may not be remembered the way they deserve to be remembered.

My father served for 36 years in the Army and was a veteran of 3 wars. He was an armor officer - a tanker. During WWII he fought on Saipan, Leyte and Okinawa. As you might imagine he was a tough old guy not given much to displays of emotion. But on Saipan my dad lost his best friend in the world to a sniper. Lt Bill Dorey was his name and he was from PA. Dorey and my father were extremely close, more like brothers than friends. Dorey was a heck of soldier too - recognized by all as an outstanding tank commander and leader. My father called him the best armor officer he ever knew, and that was tall praise from my dad.

Dorey was killed trying to help a wounded GI get out of the line of fire. From the time I can remember, I knew Dorey's name and story. It was one of the few stories my dad would tell us about his war experiences. But you could tell Dorey's death haunted him.

Of course, life goes on, families are raised and we get old. Some 50 years after the war my father and mother were traveling through PA and Dorey's home town happened to be nearby. My dad was active in veterans organizations and he figured that if anyone would know of Bill Dorey, it would be the local American Legion post. They stopped by and asked. Like I said, it was 50 years after the war, and no one there knew the name. But one of the men went to the back and brought out an old scrapbook saying a lot of the guys from the area who had served were in there. Sure enough, about half way through, my dad turned the page and there was a picture of a forever young and smiling Bill Dorey, in uniform and exactly as my dad remembered him.

My mom says my dad just broke down when he saw Dorey's picture. All of that had been bottled up in there since the war and just needed to come out. 50 years later, he was still grieving over Dorey's loss. All his life he'd kept Dorey's memory alive. Not only that, he'd passed it on to his sons. And I've passed it on to my son. I've also added names from my era to be remembered, like my good friend Stuart Barnette - "Barney" - who was killed in action in Vietnam.

Memorial Day is about those who gave up their tomorrows for our today. They're the men and women who forever gave up the chance to see and hold the child born while they were at war. The chance to again caress their husband or wife and tell them they love them. The chance to hold their mother's hand and bask in her sweet smile one last time. Or to stare in pure awe at their first grandchild.

They gave it all in the service of their country, and it is our job as citizens of this great land to remember them and their sacrifice. So the next time you are near a national cemetery, take some time and stop in with your family and spend a moment with the heroes who are buried there.

They are all someone you should know.

Great Book Review

Here’s a Book Perez Hilton and Barack Obama Should Read
Doug Giles
Saturday, May 23, 2009

Not only should Perez read this particular book, but so should Obama and his male entitlement mooks. Maybe Adam Lambert should give it a gander—and all the rest of the American Idol males, too, for that matter. I’m also certain that it would be advantageous for 99% of evangelical men and all the current boys who make up the Republican Party’s leadership to peruse its contents.

So, what’s the book that’ll cure Perez’s paranormalities and shore up BHO’s sell out mentality? Well, it is not Liberace’s biography or Dr. I. Blow’s new book, How Guys Can Get in Touch with Their Inner Diva, or my 2006 book, 10 Habits of Decidedly Defective People, or another one of Alinsky’s rags.

The book that could possibly (maybe) cure Hilton’s heinously deep weirdness, the effete bent of our culture, the wuss tick in churches, Obama’s many ills, as well as the pusillanimity of GOP politicos is Frank Miniter’s new destined-to-be-bestselling tome, The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide: Recovering the Lost Art of Manhood.

As most of my regular readers know, one of my favorite whipping posts is the metrosexual male imago the man-haters are successfully saddling our sons with. This Puss-in-Boots culture detests men who would be men. That’s why parents and grandparents who loathe what the media and various institutions are trying to do to our boys need Miniter’s new book more than Pelosi needs Jesus and a straight jacket. Frank has penned a manifesto for manhood, a veritable tour de force for testosterone that decisively rebels against the gush of this sassy society.

So what’s so great about Miniter’s book on the lost art of manhood? Here are four things that flick my switch:

• It’s not 400 pages long. Frank cuts to the chase. No long, drawn-out blah, blah, blah fluff trying to fill pages so his publisher won’t sue him for not hitting his contractual word count. As a man, I appreciate that. I’ve got stuff to do. Don’t go wafty on me. Get to the point. And Frank does just that.

• It’s insanely practical. In TUMSG, not only will Miniter hit you with some heavies regarding the philosophic aspects of classic male virtues, but he’ll also lay out: 5 ways to purify water; which survival knife is best; how to survive if you get lost; how to rescue a capsized boater; how to fend off a bear, cougar and alligator attack; how to spot poisonous snakes; how to control arterial bleeding; 10 rules of gun safety; Marine Corps sniper tactics; 10 steps to field dress a deer; fishing strategies for stream, lake and ocean; how to throw a fastball, curve and a change-up; how to run with the bulls of Pamplona; how to choose the perfect candy, flowers and jewelry for your lady; how to judge, cut and smoke a cigar; the differences between certain whiskeys, wines and beers; how to win at poker; the importance of the 10 Commandments; 100 movies and 100 books every dude should see and read; and the 10 most manly deaths—from Davy Crockett to Jesus Christ. And that’s just a fraction of the useful stuff Frank cranks in this politically incorrect, metrosexual maligning manuscript.

• It lauds classic male traits of yesteryear, things like: self confidence, precision, wisdom, humility, bravery, strength, honor, sacrifice and knowledge. You remember those masculine traits, don’t you? Not only does Frank float these old school assets but he also profiles many men who embodied these goodies while here on planet earth.

• He walks his talk. Believe it or not, Frank lives this stuff . . . at least as much as a sinner can. Miniter has floated the Amazon (the river, not the online superstore), run with the bulls of Pamplona, and hunted everything from bear in Russia to elk with the Apache to kudu in the Kalahari. Along the way Frank learned boxing from Floyd Patterson, spelunked into Pompey’s cave, and I hear he can make a wicked martini. FM’s a graduate of the oldest private military academy in the US, a place that still teaches honor and old school gentlemanly conduct and believes, obviously, “that men need this book because the US has lost its code of honor as enumerated by its Founding Fathers.”

Hey parent and/or grandparent, give me your good ear for a sec. The MSM, public schools, pop culture, effeminate branches of evangelicalism and liberal politics have made being a man, in the classic sense of the word, a bad thing. If you want to make certain your son or grandson morphs into a dandy dilatory dipstick then allow him to ogle pop culture, admire our current political clime, and send him to a church that’s filled with dancing wood fairies, a lot of “hugging and sharing,” and more floral displays than an FTD warehouse. They will wring out of him any and all vestiges of that which makes him a man. You might as well stock up on eye-liner, fingernail polish, glitter, James Blunt CDs, and some skinny stretch jeans right now because he’s gonna need ‘em.

However, should you desire that your son become a William Wallace, you must do the following:

Buy Miniter’s book!

In addition, buy my audio books, Raising Boys That Feminists Will Hate and God’s Warriors & Wild Men (www.clashradio.com), and Doug Wilson’s book, Future Men. The aforementioned will provide you and your Y chromosome with all the information and inspiration needed for him to be the provider, protector, hunter and hero God intended him to become.

Also, single ladies, if you have some 21st century metro guy begging to take you out on a date or wanting your hand in marriage, before you plow forward with Mr. Sassy Pants you might want to have him digest Frank’s book as a good acid test to verify whether or not you’re saddling up to a man or a hamster. Let him read it. See if it gives him a tummy ache. If it doesn’t make him run screaming to mommy and he actually cowboys up and begins to embody what this survivor guide espouses—for, let’s say, five years—then go out with him. Unless, of course, you like dating hamsters who weep while watching the movie Twilight.

Great stuff, Frank.

Congrats!

K Street Skirts Obama Rules

cross posted from Under the Influence

By Bara Vaida

Though lobbying reports filed with Congress show that 871 lobbyists registered in the first quarter of 2009 to lobby on the stimulus package, only 12 of them appear on filings that government agencies are now required to post online under the Obama administration's new rules related to lobbyist communication with the executive branch, ProPublica reports.

The story suggests that lobbying firms are handing off the formal influence duties to lawyers and junior staff who aren't registered to lobby and hence don't fall under the new restrictions.

Under a March 20 directive, lobbyists may not talk directly to executive branch officials about specific projects funded by the stimulus package and instead must put all requests in writing.

Under a 60-day review period, the administration is currently examining feedback about the rules from the K Street community. Critics say that the rules are reducing transparency rather than increasing it, as intended.

ProPublica has also put together a who's who list on those lobbying on the stimulus. See here:Registered

Comment

Gee ya wonder? To think that what a lobbyist communicates would be required to be published with access for review by the public. On the other hand what lawyers say to prospective congressmen in relation to a clients needs could be considered privileged information between client and congressman.

Has this been the intention of the "O" administration all along? Or is it now just a case of good intentions going astray because of devious methods cooked up by powerful interest groups bent on sidestepping more restrictive policy?

Somehow I cannot wrap my brain around the idea that Obama's staff people nor he could not have mulled over how and how beneficial the new direct communication plan they have implemented could be in favor of more secrecy, rather than more openness.

Anyone who has not already seen just how devious Obama's handlers are when it comes to "what is said and what is actually implemented" has got a serious case of the legally termed "Deaf,dumb,and blind;(Legal Definition) DEAF, DUMB, AND BLIND. A man born deaf, dumb, and blind, is considered an idiot. (q.v.) 1 Bl. Com. 304; F. N. B. 233; 2 Bouv. Inst. n. 2111. idiot. (q.v.) 1 Bl. Com. 304; F. N. B. 233; 2 Bouv. Inst. n. 2111.

Corrupsion a lo largo de la frontera

Rey Guerra, the former sheriff of Starr County, Texas, pleaded guilty May 1 to a narcotics conspiracy charge in federal district court in McAllen, Texas. Guerra admitted to using information obtained in his official capacity to help a friend (a Mexican drug trafficker allegedly associated with Los Zetas) evade U.S. counternarcotics efforts. On at least one occasion, Guerra also attempted to learn the identity of a confidential informant who had provided authorities with information regarding cartel operations so he could pass it to his cartel contact.

In addition to providing intelligence to Los Zetas, Guerra also reportedly helped steer investigations away from people and facilities associated with Los Zetas. He also sought to block progress on investigations into arrested individuals associated with Los Zetas to protect other members associated with the organization. Guerra is scheduled for sentencing July 29; he faces 10 years to life imprisonment, fines of up to $4 million and five years of supervised release.

Guerra is just one of a growing number of officials on the U.S. side of the border who have been recruited as agents for Mexico’s powerful and sophisticated drug cartels. Indeed, when one examines the reach and scope of the Mexican cartels’ efforts to recruit agents inside the United States to provide intelligence and act on the cartels’ behalf, it becomes apparent that the cartels have demonstrated the ability to operate more like a foreign intelligence service than a traditional criminal organization.
Fluidity and Flexibility

For many years now, STRATFOR has followed developments along the U.S.-Mexican border and has studied the dynamics of the cross-border illicit flow of people, drugs, weapons and cash.

One of the most notable characteristics about this flow of contraband is its flexibility. When smugglers encounter an obstacle to the flow of their product, they find ways to avoid it. For example, as we’ve previously discussed in the case of the extensive border fence in the San Diego sector, drug traffickers and human smugglers diverted a good portion of their volume around the wall to the Tucson sector; they even created an extensive network of tunnels under the fence to keep their contraband (and profits) flowing.

Likewise, as maritime and air interdiction efforts between South America and Mexico have become more successful, Central America has become increasingly important to the flow of narcotics from South America to the United States. This reflects how the drug-trafficking organizations have adjusted their method of shipment and their trafficking routes to avoid interdiction efforts and maintain the northward flow of narcotics.

Over the past few years, a great deal of public and government attention has focused on the U.S.-Mexican border. In response to this attention, the federal and border state governments in the United States have erected more barriers, installed an array of cameras and sensors and increased the manpower committed to securing the border. While these efforts certainly have not hermetically sealed the border, they do appear to be having some impact — an impact magnified by the effectiveness of interdiction efforts elsewhere along the narcotics supply chain.

According to the most recent statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration, from January 2007 through September 2008 the price per pure gram of cocaine increased 89.1 percent, or from $96.61 to $182.73, while the purity of cocaine seized on the street decreased 31.3 percent, dropping from 67 percent pure cocaine to 46 percent pure cocaine. Recent anecdotal reports from law enforcement sources indicate that cocaine prices have remained high, and that the purity of cocaine on the street has remained poor.
Overcoming Human Obstacles

In another interesting trend that has emerged over the past few years, as border security has tightened and as the flow of narcotics has been impeded, the number of U.S. border enforcement officers arrested on charges of corruption has increased notably. This increased corruption represents a logical outcome of the fluidity of the flow of contraband. As the obstacles posed by border enforcement have become more daunting, people have become the weak link in the enforcement system. In some ways, people are like tunnels under the border wall — i.e., channels employed by the traffickers to help their goods get to market.

From the Mexican cartels’ point of view, it is cheaper to pay an official several thousand dollars to allow a load of narcotics to pass by than it is to risk having the shipment seized. Such bribes are simply part of the cost of doing business — and in the big picture, even a low-level local agent can be an incredible bargain.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 21 CBP officers were arrested on corruption charges during the fiscal year that ended in September 2008, as opposed to only 4 in the preceding fiscal year. In the current fiscal year (since Oct. 1), 14 have been arrested. And the problem with corruption extends further than just customs or border patrol officers. In recent years, police officers, state troopers, county sheriffs, National Guard members, judges, prosecutors, deputy U.S. marshals and even the FBI special agent in charge of the El Paso office have been linked to Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. Significantly, the cases being prosecuted against these public officials of all stripes are just the tip of the iceberg. The underlying problem of corruption is much greater.

A major challenge to addressing the issue of border corruption is the large number of jurisdictions along the border, along with the reality that corruption occurs at the local, state and federal levels across those jurisdictions. Though this makes it very difficult to gather data relating to the total number of corruption investigations conducted, sources tell us that while corruption has always been a problem along the border, the problem has ballooned in recent years — and the number of corruption cases has increased dramatically.

In addition to the complexity brought about by the multiple jurisdictions, agencies and levels of government involved, there simply is not one single agency that can be tasked with taking care of the corruption problem. It is just too big and too wide. Even the FBI, which has national jurisdiction and a mandate to investigate public corruption cases, cannot step in and clean up all the corruption. The FBI already is being stretched thin with its other responsibilities, like counterterrorism, foreign counterintelligence, financial fraud and bank robbery. The FBI thus does not even have the capacity to investigate every allegation of corruption at the federal level, much less at the state and local levels. Limited resources require the agency to be very selective about the cases it decides to investigate. Given that there is no real central clearinghouse for corruption cases, most allegations of corruption are investigated by a wide array of internal affairs units and other agencies at the federal, state and local levels.

Any time there is such a mixture of agencies involved in the investigation of a specific type of crime, there is often bureaucratic friction, and there are almost always problems with information sharing. This means that pieces of information and investigative leads developed in the investigation of some of these cases are not shared with the appropriate agencies. To overcome this information sharing problem, the FBI has established six Border Corruption Task Forces designed to bring local, state and federal officers together to focus on corruption tied to the U.S.-Mexican border, but these task forces have not yet been able to solve the complex problem of coordination.
Sophisticated Spotting

Efforts to corrupt officials along the U.S.-Mexican border are very organized and very focused, something that is critical to understanding the public corruption issue along the border. Some of the Mexican cartels have a long history of successfully corrupting public officials on both sides of the border. Groups like the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) have successfully recruited scores of intelligence assets and agents of influence at the local, state and even federal levels of the Mexican government. They even have enjoyed significant success in recruiting agents in elite units such as the anti-organized crime unit (SIEDO) of the Office of the Mexican Attorney General (PGR). The BLO also has recruited Mexican employees working for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, and even allegedly owned Mexico’s former drug czar, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, who reportedly was receiving $450,00 a month from the organization.

In fact, the sophistication of these groups means they use methods more akin to the intelligence recruitment processes used by foreign intelligence services than those normally associated with a criminal organization. The cartels are known to conduct extensive surveillance and background checks on potential targets to determine how to best pitch to them. Like the spotting methods used by intelligence agencies, the surveillance conducted by the cartels on potential targets is designed to glean as many details about the target as possible, including where they live, what vehicles they drive, who their family members are, their financial needs and their peccadilloes.

Historically, many foreign intelligence services are known to use ethnicity in their favor, heavily targeting persons sharing an ethnic background found in the foreign country. Foreign services also are known to use relatives of the target living in the foreign country to their advantage. Mexican cartels use these same tools. They tend to target Hispanic officers and often use family members living in Mexico as recruiting levers. For example, Luis Francisco Alarid, who had been a CBP officer at the Otay Mesa, Calif., port of entry, was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison in February for his participation in a conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens and marijuana into the United States. One of the people Alarid admitted to conspiring with was his uncle, who drove a van loaded with marijuana and illegal aliens through a border checkpoint manned by Alarid.

Like family spy rings (such as the Cold War spy ring run by John Walker), there also have been family border corruption rings. Raul Villarreal and his brother, Fidel, both former CBP agents in San Diego, were arraigned March 16 after fleeing the United States in 2006 after learning they were being investigated for corruption. The pair was captured in Mexico in October 2008 and extradited back to the United States.
‘Plata o Sexo’

When discussing human intelligence recruiting, it is not uncommon to refer to the old cold war acronym MICE (money, ideology, compromise and ego) to explain the approach used to recruit an agent. When discussing corruption in Mexico, people often repeat the phrase “plata o plomo,” Spanish for “money or lead” — meaning “take the money or we’ll kill you.” However, in most border corruption cases involving American officials, the threat of plomo is not as powerful as it is inside Mexico. Although some officials charged with corruption have claimed as a defense that they were intimidated into behaving corruptly, juries have rejected these arguments. This dynamic could change if the Mexican cartels begin to target officers in the United States for assassination as they have in Mexico.

With plomo an empty threat north of the border, plata has become the primary motivation for corruption along the Mexican border. In fact, good old greed — the M in MICE — has always been the most common motivation for Americans recruited by foreign intelligence services. The runner-up, which supplants plomo in the recruitment equation inside the United Sates, is “sexo,” aka “sex.” Sex, an age-old espionage recruitment tool that fits under the compromise section of MICE, has been seen in high-profile espionage cases, including the one involving the Marine security guards at the U.S Embassy in Moscow. Using sex to recruit an agent is often referred to as setting a “honey trap.” Sex can be used in two ways. First, it can be used as a simple payment for services rendered. Second, it can be used as a means to blackmail the agent. (The two techniques can be used in tandem.)

It is not at all uncommon for border officials to be offered sex in return for allowing illegal aliens or drugs to enter the country, or for drug-trafficking organizations to use attractive agents to seduce and then recruit officers. Several officials have been convicted in such cases. For example, in March 2007, CBP inspection officer Richard Elizalda, who had worked at the San Ysidro, Calif., port of entry, was sentenced to 57 months in prison for conspiring with his lover, alien smuggler Raquel Arin, to let the organization she worked for bring illegal aliens through his inspection lane. Elizalda also accepted cash for his efforts — much of which he allegedly spent on gifts for Arin — so in reality, Elizalda was a case of “plata y sexo” rather than an either-or deal.
Corruption Cases Handled Differently

When the U.S. government hires an employee who has family members living in a place like Beijing or Moscow, the background investigation for that employee is pursued with far more interest than if the employee has relatives in Ciudad Juarez or Tijuana. Mexico traditionally has not been seen as a foreign counterintelligence threat, even though it has long been recognized that many countries, like Russia, are very active in their efforts to target the United States from Mexico. Indeed, during the Cold War, the KGB’s largest rezidentura (the equivalent of a CIA station) was located in Mexico City.

Employees with connections to Mexico frequently have not been that well vetted, period. In one well-publicized incident, the Border Patrol hired an illegal immigrant who was later arrested for alien smuggling. In July 2006, U.S. Border Patrol agent Oscar Ortiz was sentenced to 60 months in prison after admitting to smuggling more than 100 illegal immigrants into the United States. After his arrest, investigators learned that Ortiz was an illegal immigrant himself who had used a counterfeit birth certificate when he was hired. Ironically, Ortiz also had been arrested for attempting to smuggle two illegal immigrants into the United States shortly before being hired by the Border Patrol. (He was never charged for that attempt.)

From an investigative perspective, corruption cases tend to be handled more as one-off cases, and they do not normally receive the same sort of extensive investigation into the suspect’s friends and associates that would be conducted in a foreign counterintelligence case. In other words, if a U.S. government employee is recruited by the Chinese or Russian intelligence service, the investigation receives far more energy — and the suspect’s circle of friends, relatives and associates receives far more scrutiny — than if he is recruited by a Mexican cartel.

In espionage cases, there is also an extensive damage assessment investigation conducted to ensure that all the information the suspect could have divulged is identified, along with the identities of any other people the suspect could have helped his handler recruit. Additionally, after-action reviews are conducted to determine how the suspect was recruited, how he was handled and how he could have been uncovered earlier. The results of these reviews are then used to help shape future counterintelligence investigative efforts. They are also used in the preparation of defensive counterintelligence briefings to educate other employees and help protect them from being recruited.

This differences in urgency and scope between the two types of investigations is driven by the perception that the damage to national security is greater if an official is recruited by a foreign intelligence agency than if he is recruited by a criminal organization. That assessment may need to be re-examined, given that the Mexican cartels are criminal organizations with the proven sophistication to recruit U.S. officials at all levels of government — and that this has allowed them to move whomever and whatever they wish into the United States.

The problem of public corruption is very widespread, and to approach corruption cases in a manner similar to foreign counterintelligence cases would require a large commitment of investigative, prosecutorial and defensive resources. But the threat posed by the Mexican cartels is different than that posed by traditional criminal organizations, meaning that countering it will require a nontraditional approach.