No surprise, but good to hear that wiser heads seem to be prevailing in Washington.
Here is the hot news today, from CNN:
Washington (CNN)Top U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday that ISIS was likely to attempt direct attacks on the U.S. in the coming year and that the group was infiltrating refugees escaping from Iraq and Syria to move across borders.
ISIS “will probably attempt to conduct additional attacks in Europe, and attempt to direct attacks on the U.S. homeland in 2016,” Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
“Refugee” men in Hungary. Clapper says ISIS is among them (gee! big surprise!).
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was also at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, estimated that violent extremists were active in about 40 countries and that there currently exist more terrorist safe havens “than at any time in history.”
Clapper warned that ISIS and its eight branches were the No. 1 terrorist threat, and that it was using the refugee exodus from violence in Iraq and Syria to hide among innocent civilians in order to reach other countries.
Clapper said ISIS was “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow,” adding that they were “pretty skilled at phony passports so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers.”
Syrians trickling in so far!
As we reported the other day, the Syrian flow into the US is going extremely slowly and I’m guessing there are some in Washington who are trying to keep America safe. At the present rate, there is no way Obama will get 10,000 Syrians in here by the end of this fiscal year on September 30th. (Unless those UPS flightsare for real!).
Ho hum! No real surprise here. A South Dakota legislator had introduced a bill that would have attempted to rein-in the refugee program in that state, but Betty Oldencamp, Lutheran Social Services of SD Prez convinced him they were taking very good care of the citizens of South Dakota and that there wouldn’t be terrorists and other undesirables coming to SD through the program. The bill was unlikely to go anywhere because the REPUBLICAN governor was all for more refugees colonizing the state anyway. Since South Dakota is a Wilson-Fish state, he has a ready-made opportunity to sue the federal government using a states’ rights argument, here, and has not taken it. A surefire way to find out where your governor stands on refugees in twelve US states is whether any of them agree to be a plaintiff on the lawsuit crafted by the Thomas More Law Center. So far, no brave governor is willing to defend the Constitution.
This very cool map shows the states getting more refugees as a percentage of their populations. North and South Dakota are by far the most disproportionate. Idaho and New Hampshire not far behind. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2015/05/14/36144-refugees-admitted-to-us-in-first-seven-months-of-fy2015/
I’ll betcha that there are some powerful special interests, big businesses, the Chamber of Commerce making sure they get a continuous supply of cheap labor flowing to SD! Security, economic stability and cultural cohesiveness be damned. Follow the money! Find out which business interests are donating to elected officials!
LSS South Dakota is rich!
By the way, LSS South Dakota is rolling in YOUR money. Check out USA Spending.gov. Yikes! Almost $40 MILLION of your tax dollars have gone (via grants and sub-grants) to this one state ‘religious’ non-profit since 2007.
From Rapid City Journal:
House Bill 1158, which sought to give the South Dakota governor the power to keep refugees out of the state, is dead.
The proposed law has been tabled by its lead sponsor, state Rep. Scott Craig, R-Rapid City.
Betty Oldencamp, President of LSS South Dakota convinced legislators that they have everything under control. What a coincidence! Oldencamp is on the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce in Sioux Falls. http://www.siouxfallschamber.com/board-of-directors.cfm
“That’s a nice way to say the sponsor withdrew the bill,” Craig said in a phone interview Monday, adding that HB 1158, which was scheduled for a committee hearing on Monday, will not come up again during this legislative session.
Craig said he made the decision to abandon the bill after a weekend conversation with his bill’s state Senate co-sponsor, Sen. Bruce Rampelberg, R-Rapid City, and Betty Oldencamp, president of Lutheran Social Services.
Apart from granting the governor extraordinary powers, HB 1158 would have created an infrastructure within the South Dakota Department of Social Services to monitor and coordinate the resettlement of refugees, a function that Lutheran Social Services already performs.
“Everything that bill attempted to secure, they already do, so it’s unnecessary,” Craig said. “We’ve got a phenomenal process. Everything (Oldencamp) described is very thorough.”
Continue reading here.
And, go here, for more on problems with the refugee program in the Dakotas. Don’t miss the 2014 Iraqi refugee sex trafficking case, here.
Update! Thanks to readers who found that the bearded man is Darren Ornitzwho lives in Brooklyn, NY. He may have earlier lived in Greenwich, CT. He is a Reuters freelance photographer and is “leaning toward” supporting Bernie Sanders. Once you know his name the rest falls into place. Here is one report on him. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/politics/donald-trump-syria-refugee-crisis/
A bearded man at a townhall meeting in NH asked Donald Trump if he could look Syrian kids in the face and tell them they can’t come to America. Trump said, yes, he absolutely could do that.
Trump then went on to say, we don’t know who they are. He said that the Gulf States should help build safe zones in Syria where refugees could be cared for until the conflict is over. He also said that most of them want to go home anyway. All of that is true.
He also predicted a coming revolution in Germany and said, “Wait until you see what they do to Merkel!” The bearded man was obviously a plant. He said he came from Greenwich, CT and that Greenwich was going to get Syrian refugees. Trump quipped that he must be rich to live in Greenwich.
Can you identify the bearded man? We know that one of the driving forces behind more resettlement of Muslims to Connecticut is CAIR Connecticut(being helped by Senator Richard Blumenthal).
Who is the bearded man? Can you help identify him?
Watch the clip here (hat tip Walid Shoebat):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkDALLeecyk
By the way, of the 841 Syrians admitted to the US in FY2016, 833 are Muslims. We are not saving Syrian Christians.
