Month: January 2011

House Republican leadership wimps out on choice for immigration subcommittee chairmanship

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update January 23rd: This is really an update of Falknor’s Blue Ridge Forum piece on the two Kings in Congress and how Congressman Peter King has also wimped out on promised shariah hearings.  See Diana West here.

Update January 22nd: Richard Falknor writing at Blue Ridge Forum has more background on what is happening with the Republican establishment in Congress on the issues of immigration and shariah law.

Just when some of us were hopeful that the new House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law (here, apparently not updated as of this writing) would hold hearings on some troublesome areas of the refugee and asylee programs (like the Somali asylum seekers arriving on our borders by the hundreds, here), it looks like Speaker of the House Boehner has blinked and must have had some behind the scenes role in choosing a moderate (sounding) Republican rather than Rep. Steve King of Iowa for the chairmanship.  King would really have shaken things up.

This is from AP a week ago. And, here is a story from The Hill.  Maybe there is something more up-to-date than the AP story, but this is very discouraging news:

WASHINGTON — Republicans eliminated a potential liability with Latino voters Friday by refusing to give the top spot on an immigration subcommittee to a congressman who once proposed stopping illegal immigrants with an electrified fence.

The expectation was that Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, House Judiciary Committee chairman, would choose fellow

Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa to be the next chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and other related issues.

Instead he chose California Rep. Elton Gallegly, who is considered an immigration hawk, but who is less likely to make explosive comments that make him a target for critics.

[…..]

By choosing Gallegly, Republicans get a subcommittee chairman whose public comments are less likely to be incendiary and won’t GOP hurt efforts to become more Latino-friendly, while depriving Democrats of an easy target in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.

Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, said the decision is a clear message Republican leadership doesn’t want to antagonize Latinos.

The AP says Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith passed over King and chose Gallegly, but I don’t believe it for a minute. This is the inside the beltway Republican leadership wimping out!   And, to me, it is clear evidence that the pro-open borders Republicans (the Bush/McCain gang) are taking control.

A reminder to readers. Check MicEvHill.com daily for what is happening in Congress on immigration.  This blogger is an open-borders advocate but it’s a good place to see what they are up to and what is happening in Congress and in Washington on immigration and refugee issues.  Oh, and since he works for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops you probably pay his salary!

Tyson’s Shelbyville plant gets another bomb threat

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update January 18th: Arrest made in the graffiti incident—bored twentysomething confesses,  bomb threats appear to be stunts too, but those responsible have not yet been identified, according to this report.

Update: Jerry Gordon got the scoop and posted it at New English Review. An arrest was made today in this case.   I’m sure we will have more news tomorrow on the motives of this Tysons employee.

I didn’t even tell you about the first  bomb threat, here, but over the weekend the controversial Shelbyville, TN chicken plant got another bomb threat.

This is what News Channel 5 from Nashville is reporting:

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn.- For the second time in less than a month, a terror threat is made at a mid-state plant.

Shelbyville Police say a bomb threat was made Saturday night at the Tyson Plant. They say the threat was written in graffiti on a wall inside the plant.

This is not the first time this has happened. At the end of December, someone also used graffiti to make threats against employees at the plant.

For the earlier graffiti (reportedly “all americans must die”) terror threat that the feds were called in for, go here.  Tysons has still not released what exactly was written in that pre-Christmas event, nor whether a woman’s bathroom had been set on fire.

Meanwhile, the ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’ propaganda film has been selected by the US State Department to be shown around the world.

The documentary film is meant to show how a southern redneck Bible-belt town can learn to live with Somali refugees who have come to work at Tyson Foods.   I told you more about that Saturday, here.

Last evening I happened to see a Fox News critical report of this State Department program that is apparently sending films around the globe that are showing the world our dirty linen at a huge cost to taxpayers.  Searching around for a link to this story, the only thing I found quickly was this AP story by none other than Matthew Lee.  Longtime readers will remember Lee as the reporter who each month at the end of the Bush Administration pounded Bush and the State Department on not bringing enough Iraqi refugees to the US fast enough.

Here is what Lee says about the State Department’s multi-million dollar propaganda film series of which ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’ is a part.

The “American Documentary Showcase” series is funded and organized by the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. It brings “award-winning contemporary American documentaries to audiences around the world to offer a view of American society and culture as seen by independent documentary filmmakers,” according to its website.

[….]

The department said that this year’s selections, chosen by the University Film and Video Association and independent international group of filmmakers, educators and students, explore topics ranging from civil rights and the treatment of military veterans to environmentalism and freedom of the press.

More later, I don’t think this issue is going away.

Jordan: Trees or refugees that is the question

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I just love it when two great missions of the political Left come in conflict.  This story from Jordan captured my interest this morning.  Environmental activists in the Middle East (I didn’t know they had any!) are trying to stop the destruction of an important forest ecosystem.

Turns out that one of the pressures on Jordan, its environment, and its water supply is the large numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees living there.

From the Green Prophet :

As well as the threats posed to local ecosystems and economic activities, the Halt Ajloun Deforestation campaign say that the danger to Ajloun Forest from the new development has wider significance. Jordan as a country already has less than 1% forest cover and suffers extensively from a lack of water. It has a high population density for such an arid country (partly resulting from the large numbers of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees living there), and has been named one of the ten most water-scarce nations on the planet.

Save the Middle East—bring refugees to America!

So since the Sierra Club and other US environmental groups have become either outright in favor of open borders, or dead silent on the issue, we could just take all those refugees off Jordan’s hands and thus save Jordan’s environment.

As for the US environment, well, we have already noted that Somalis like reader Abdi, here, thinks America is pretty empty and they can just fill it right up by taking over and having lots of babies.

This is what I said about the Sierra Club most recently:

Why has the Sierra Club led a campaign to keep our borders open? I believe it is because Carl Pope, their longtime head honcho, is first and foremost a Socialist (maybe a Marxist) one-worlder.  Longtime advocates of closing our borders have horror stories to tell about how Pope has over the years fought any effort by Sierra Club members to get into the immigration issue.  In fact, immigration control groups like NumbersUSA,* FAIR, and the Center for Immigration Studies were initially created to counter the pro-immigration (through silence) bias of the major environmental groups.   Now, of course, they have a much broader mission.

I did a lot of research on Pope, here is just one story (with links to previous posts on Pope), he sits on the notorious Apollo Alliance board and is good buddies with Marxist Van Jones.

Maybe the Green Prophet should research that story!

ORR! Where is the Annual Report to Congress?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

With each passing month that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) continues to break the law and not send an Annual Report to Congress it sends a clear message— they are hiding something.  

The ORR is now two years behind having only produced Annual Reports up to fiscal year 2007, here.

This is the law:

 Section 413(a) of the Immigration and Nationalities Act states:

Sec. 413. [8 U.S.C. 1523] (a) The Secretary, shall submit a report on activities under this chapter to the Committees on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives and of the Senate not later than the January 31 following the end of each fiscal year, beginning with fiscal year 1980.

So, in just a few weeks, on January 31st, ORR will be behind three Annual Reports.  They already have broken the law for FY 2008, FY 2009 and soon they will be due the FY 2010 report!

What are they hiding?   My guess is that they don’t want Congress and the public to know the horrible employment rate for refugees, the increasing use of public assistance and the huge amounts of tax dollars going to the program via grants and contracts to federal contractors (here are the federal contractors, called VOLAGs*) during the great recession.

*VOLAG stands for voluntary agency which is such a joke because you are paying for the resettlment programs of many religious organizations.

Readers might want to visit our ‘where to find information’ category (we have 162 posts there!) which I just now revisited for some information.  We have quite a bit of good material posted.

Welcome to Shelbyville! The rise of a propaganda film

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

When the BeCause Foundation filmmakers arrived in the tense Tennessee town of Shelbyville in 2008, this is what I said:

BeWare BeCause!

Shelbyville BeWare BeCause, they are using your town!   They will gloss over the tensions and problems of the Tyson’s African employees and then show what great work the TIRRC and the Somali Community Center are doing to bring you all together in harmonious unity.  This is a politically motivated campaign.  Your film, your town, will then be used to shame other towns into silence.

And, so it is!  But, there was one other element I hadn’t fully focused on when the filmmakers arrived coincidentally when the Somali Community Center of Nashville and the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition had organized a “unity meeting,” and that was that the US State Department would latch on to the film and show it around the world before it had been distributed in the US.  (And, who knows, perhaps they even commissioned the film in the first place!)

You see the State Department under Hillary Clinton has a huge stake in this—in convincing Americans that it’s just, well, American, to welcome diversity, to erase borders, and to create one great big happy multicultural world.

Well, that and they have a stake in keeping the spigot for cheap labor flowing to big business political donors and convincing Africans and others that they should come to America (why else show it in Africa).  They also aim to keep your tax dollars flowing to the international immigration industry and the federal contractors who are supposed to be resettling refugees.  So, it’s no surprise that “Welcome to Shelbyville” was selected by the State Department for a big bucks award.

What got me started on this story again was a piece earlier this week where filmmaker Kim Snyder, tells us that the recent Tyson’s controversy was all baloney and that they are busy showing their version of Shelbyville in Ireland and Belgium. The general theme is that if redneck Bible-belt Tennesseans could start to see that maybe Somalis weren’t so bad after all, then your town should be ashamed of itself if you have concerns.

Why Belgium and Ireland?  Because both of those countries are experiencing an influx of Somali Muslims and people are worried about it as we have reported previously on these pages.   Also, Snyder reveals that the film was rushed out to Oregon to pacify citizens of Portland after the recent terrorist threat there.  No attempted terrorist threat by a Somali refugee, just an anomaly—go back to sleep citizens of Portland and Corvallis.  (Heck, if those redneck Tennesseans can see the light, so can you!)

Then on top of that, the New York Times is now talking-up the film, but at least had the good sense to mention the word PROPAGANDA!

The people at the BeCause Foundation are community organizers plain and simple (one need only visit their website).  They are promoting a political agenda.  If someone gave me the big bucks I could produce a documentary film with a completely different and opposite slant—even if I interviewed the exact same people.

Welcome to Shelbyville is modern-day propaganda. Someone should trace the making of this film and write a book  using this film to show how Americans are being manipulated by one-worlders inside and outside of government.