Day: July 12, 2008

Congress to authorize $50 billion for disease programs, allow immigrants with HIV to enter US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update July 18th:   Passed by the Senate by a wide margin, see report here at Blue Ridge Forum (including link to  how they voted).

Urgent, July 14th:  Read the latest on this issue at America’s Survival, Inc. here.  Today is the best day to express your opinion to your Senators.

Your tax dollars:

Interesting that this information should come on the heels of our Africa post yesterday.  Hat tip:  Richard at Blue Ridge Forum.    In answer to a commenter yesterday, we do send enormous aid to countries around the world to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, but $50 billion over 5 years is way beyond anything I even imagined.

S.2731 goes to the Senate floor on Monday and is expected to be signed into law by September because it is supported by the Bush Administration  (well, maybe its a tad bit more than the Bush proposal of $30 billion, but what’s $20 billion here or there).

Here is the kicker (if $50 billion of our tax dollars wasn’t already) from the Congressional Budget Office:

….enacting S. 2731 would increase direct spending [no kidding].  The bill would allow immigrants with HIV/AIDS to enter the United States. CBO estimates that providing certain benefits to those immigrants and their children would increase direct spending by less than $500,000 in 2010 and by $83 million over the 2010-2018 period.

Refugees are already coming here with HIV (and TB for that matter) despite the ban on foreigners with the disease from traveling or immigrating to the US.  This bill would allow all immigrants to enter the US with HIV and be treated at taxpayer expense.  I don’t think it takes a genius to see how this opens the door wide to more immigrants (including illegal immigrants) who will rush the gates and become dependent on our already overburdened health care system.

Read the entire CBO report here.

Global warming causing an uptick in refugees–not!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to ignore this because it strikes me as ludicrous, but readers should know that leftists are shamelessly linking their pet  projects.   The UN reported in June that climate change (note they no longer say global warming because there is no warming) fuels conflicts which in turn produce refugees.

Climate change is fuelling conflicts around the world and helping to drive the number of people forced out of their homes to new highs, the head of the UN’s refugee agency said yesterday. After a few years of improvement, thanks mainly to large-scale resettlement in Afghanistan, the numbers of civilians uprooted by conflict is again rising. During 2007 the total jumped to 37.4 million, an increase of more than 3 million, according to statistics published today.

The figures, described as “unprecedented” by the UN, do not include people escaping natural disasters or poverty – only those fleeing conflict and persecution. But Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, said that climate change could also uproot people by provoking conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, such as water.

In an interview with the Guardian, Guterres said: “Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement, both directly through impact on environment – not allowing people to live any more in the areas where they were traditionally living – and as a trigger of extreme poverty and conflict.”

I wonder if I will live to see the day when news from the UN says that Islamic terrorism is one of the main drivers of forced displacement.    I thought maybe UN High Commissioner for Refugees Guterres  was getting close here until the last line.

“What we are witnessing is a trend in the world where more and more people feel threatened by conflict, threatened by their own government, threatened by other political, religious ethnic or social groups, threatened by nature and nature’s retaliation against human aggression – climate change is the example of that.

Threatened by nature’s retaliation against human aggression!  What!   Nature is retaliating?  Nature is getting even?  Nature doesn’t like people fighting with each other?  Nature is angry about human aggression and is fighting back by changing its climate?    Ahhh!

Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee this morning.