Category: The Opposition

Far Left Center for American Progress holds schmoozfest on immigrant/native tensions

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And the Mayor of Lewiston, Maine was invited for the all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC to report presumably on how swimmingly “receiving community” Lewiston is handling their Somali population overload.

In a letter from the Mayor, the Mayor demonstrated his either complete naivete about the Center for American Progress, a George Soros spawn, or he is an out-of-the-closet far left progressive himself.

In early November, I was contacted by representatives of the Center for American Progress and invited to attend (at their expense) a Receiving Community Roundtable in Washington, D.C. on December 14 and 15, 2010. I did attend last week.

Let me first tell you about the Center for American Progress (CAP). According to its website, it “is dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and actions. ‘Building on the achievements of progressive pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, (their) work addresses 21st century challenges such as energy, national security, economic growth and opportunity, immigration, education, and healthcare.’ They develop new policy ideas, critique the policy that stems from conservative values, and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter and shape the national debate.”

The Center was founded in 2003 to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement. CAP is headed by its founder John D. Podesta and based in Washington, D.C. They opened another office in Los Angeles in 2007. Podesta has grown this organization from an eight-person policy operation into an organization consisting of 180 full-time employees. John Podesta served as Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from October 1998 until January 2001.

The mayor and his staff obviously had the politically-correct verbiage down well enough that they got an invite and a paid trip to DC.   These Alinskyites, like Podesta, are so good at what they do!

Deputy City Administrator Phil Nadeau and I spent over a half-hour holding a conference call with CAP to tell them of our story of refugee and secondary migration here in Lewiston and Auburn. This is when I received the invitation to attend the Receiving Community Roundtable.

This was followed up by a pre-roundtable “homework” assignment that I completed with the assistance of Phil Nadeau and Sue Charron, director of Lewiston’s Social Services. We wrote up our story and submitted it to CAP, as did all the other 55 participants who came together for the December Roundtable.

[….]

The 55 participants included elected officials, service providers, professors, demographers, social scientists, anthropologists, social psychologists, political scientists, religious leaders, think tank representatives and so on. [You can bet there were no critics of more immigration to America, just talk of how to get along in the ol’ melting pot and how to keep the negative stories out of the media.]

The mayor also learned there were “hundreds” of receiving communities just like his having problems.

Let’s address the “tension” so we can move ahead with amnesty and open borders (that’s what CAP is after).

This roundtable program was designed to address the sources of immigrant-native tension and native anxiety in communities, especially where demographic changes are occurring rapidly, and to figure out ways to calm the high emotions so that we can live and work together and push Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Yippee!  A tool kit, let’s all cheer for a tool kit!  That will quiet the tensions and shut up the critics, you betcha!

As a result of all the input from this large diverse group, a writer has been commissioned to develop a report that will come out in the spring of 2011. From that report, a “Tool Kit” for receiving communities will be developed. When I receive that report, I will share its contents with you.

For more on the Center for American Progress, see this post about how they wanted Obama to airlift 100,000 Iraqis to the US, or this one where CAP is a leader in the gang of one-worlders, and here is CAP’s head honcho Podesta in the middle of the ACORN scandal.

And, for more on Lewiston, just type Lewiston into our search function and you will get dozens of posts about the on-going tension there.

P.S.  I should have mentioned that the mayor did complain to CAP that Lewiston didn’t have enough money to handle all their immigrant-related problems.

A fishy story: the Columbus, OH pepper spray tale

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I saw this story last night, it’s from Tuesday and headlined, ‘Muslim Woman Reports Harassment, Pepper Spray Assault.’   CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) is involved and calling the incident a hate crime.

Here is the story at WBNS-10TV:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Federal and local authorities are investigating a possible hate crime after a Muslim woman said she was verbally harassed and pepper sprayed on Monday outside of an Islamic center on the city’s west side.

According to a news release issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the attack happened at about 1:30 p.m. near the Abubaker Siddique Islamic Center on Sullivant Avenue.

The woman, 20, who asked not to be identified, told authorities that she first noticed a man who appeared to be watching and following her, 10TV’s Maureen Kocot reported.

“I had a bad feeling about the man while I was driving,” she said. “He looked at me in a very strange way.”

According to the woman, the man followed her to the Abubaker Siddique Islamic Center, where he got out of his vehicle and approached her.

“He just started yelling at me, cursing me out,” she said. “Saying he’s going to kill me, and saying, ‘I’m going to kill all of you, all you guys. Tell the Muslims to go back from wherever they are from.'”

The woman, who was wearing Islamic attire, told 10TV News that the man then used pepper spray on her.

“He took the spray and just sprayed it all over me,” she said. “Like, all over me. My whole eyes, my whole face, everything.”

Fortunately there is a surveillance video posted with the story.  Please watch it!  Clearly she is seen driving very fast into a parking space with another vehicle hot on her tail.  The man blocks her vehicle with his and is seen jumping out and running to the passenger door and shouting at her.  Who knows what he said, maybe she had just cut him off on the highway and this was a road rage incident.

However, this is the questionable part:  WHAT WOMAN IN HER RIGHT MIND WOULD HAVE OPENED THE CAR WINDOW TO ALLOW HIM TO DO ANYTHING TO HER? She was also completely covered with a hajib from head to toe, so that doesn’t jive with her description of him spraying her whole face.  And there didn’t appear to be anything in the man’s hands nor did he make any motion of spraying anything.

CAIR sure got involved fast wouldn’t you say!

Readers, if you see  more on this fishy story please send it my way.

Endnote: It is not clear if the woman was an immigrant, a refugee, or an American convert to Islam.  I was just interested in the story.

Update! Now I see they are saying she is a Somali immigrant.  Please go listen to her speak in the interview in the above story then read this below.

You gotta laugh if you watched the surveillance tape, this is how the story is being told in a Somali publication. They say she was beaten up by men!

A Somali women was attacked by men with pepper spray in COLUMBUS Ohio, on Monday.

The men attacked Ms.Saida Said as she was leaving a Mosque in the city, they used pepper spray while they were beatening her up, say eyewitnesses.

It is not yet known the reason behind the attack on the 20 years old female from Somalia.

The mosque officials reported the assualt and provided security camera recordings to the police.

 

Wilderness designation makes it easier for OTMs to get into the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here we go again with the perplexing issue of environmental groups aiding and abetting the Open Borders movement.  The major environmental groups mentioned in this Washington Examiner piece by Ron Arnold are the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club along with smaller local cohorts.  Hat tip: Erich.

Cops and Border Patrol are kept out of wilderness areas!

Sen. Jeff Bingaman is being called our worst border security threat. Angry Dona Ana County residents have branded the New Mexico Democrat’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Wilderness Act as “Bingaman’s Bandit Boulevard” for proposing a 50-mile-long safe haven for Mexican drug runners — and worse.

John Hummer, former chairman of the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce, reminded his community of the no-motorized-vehicle clause in wilderness laws. The Border Patrol can’t patrol.

Wilderness laws allow our own park and forest rangers to keep the cops out. That’s supposed to protect nature, but ends up protecting drug cartels, illegal immigrants — and terrorists.

We have reported many times on these pages that Other than Mexicans (OTMs) are entering the US.   The list reported in this article (and below) is a list of the ones we caught!  For example, we know that 270 Somalis recently entered illegally and have not been found.  Estimates run into the tens of thousands of dollars per Somali coming to the US by a circuitous world route; surely having paid this much they aren’t planning on doing those $9 per hour meatpacking jobs!

Wilderness designation anywhere on our borders will make it easier still for illegal aliens coming to the US looking for something other than jobs!

A U.S. Border Patrol document obtained by The Examiner shows the nationality and number of OTMs arrested last year. A few samples: Afghanistan (12); Indonesia (95); Iran (42); Iraq (42); Jordan (52); Saudi Arabia (6); Somalia (70); Yemen (22).

Members of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers say they weren’t smuggling drugs. Retired Border Patrol Officer Zack Taylor said Bingaman’s wilderness boundary is just a stroll from violent Juarez and El Paso.

Terrorists want terror, said Taylor — unexpected targets with severed body parts and dead babies. A dozen relays of three sunburned hikers carrying big backpacks could trek unmolested up Bingaman’s Boulevard, stockpiling materials to obliterate the balloon festival, the state Capitol, the Acoma Pueblo — anything we treasure.

Frank DuBois, a Reagan-era deputy assistant secretary of the interior, told me that interdicting criminals in wilderness is losing priority. Bingaman’s bill makes his wilderness a “component of the National Landscape Conservation System.” That’s ominous.

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.

* See the latest NumbersUSA video on population growth in the US and ponder the consequences for the environment.   Strange isn’t it that the environmental leadership in the US is silent.

Japan remains one of the hold-outs to the one-worlder-megalomaniacs’ goals

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

George Soros and his one-worlders, who are busy trying to eliminate boundaries in their tyrannical drive to make us all one big happy warm and fuzzy world, have a tough nut to crack in Japan where they have been sensibly trying to hold onto their unique culture.  Japan only recently began resettling a small number of refugees and continues to get the wrath of the UN and the far left “human rights” activists aimed squarely at them as we see in this story.

From The Mainichi Daily News:

TOKYO (Kyodo) — When five ethnic Karen families arrived recently from the Mera refugee camp in northwestern Thailand, Japan became the first Asian nation to accept refugees under the third-country resettlement program promoted by the United Nations.

Yet critics remain skeptical of Tokyo, often criticized for its restrictive refugee policy, and some experts said a much more comprehensive approach is necessary to make any significant difference.

“Japan’s refugee policy lags way behind the rest of the world,” said Shogo Watanabe, a lawyer actively involved in human rights issues concerning refugees and other foreign residents in Japan. “From the very beginning when Japan ratified in 1981 the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, it has never had a consistent policy.”

Japan decided in December 2008 to accept Myanmar refugees from the Mera camp under the resettlement pilot project. The move was welcomed by U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres as a symbolic development in Japanese asylum policy and it also raised hopes of setting an example for other Asian countries to follow.

“But with a quota of 90 people over three years, compared to the tens of thousands that the United States [it is mostly the US as you will see shortly] and various European countries are taking in, what Japan is doing does not qualify as having fulfilled its responsibility,” Watanabe said.

According to the UNHCR, 24 countries* currently take part in the refugee resettlement program, which calls for third countries to accept refugees who have fled to nearby states due to conflicts in their home countries but have found it difficult to settle there or return.

Among the top three resettlement destinations, more than 62,000 refugees relocated to the United States through the UNHCR in 2009, while Australia accepted over 6,700 people and Canada took in more than 6,500.

*Most countries in the world DO NOT take refugees.  Why?  Because they are trying to hold onto their cultures too!

For more on Japan, use our search function.

Religious leaders go (far) left as flocks go right

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is another article that addresses the growing schism in many American faith communities.   No where is the divide so great and obvious as it is on the issue of immigration.

Author James R. Edwards Jr. of the Center for Immigration Studies published at Right Side News begins:

Research demonstrates that elites and the rank-and-file in many segments of society (e.g., business, religion, organized labor) are split over immigration issues. Elites tend to manifest post-American, cosmopolitan ideologies, while their grassroots members preserve deep-seated patriotic beliefs and attitudes, including with regard to immigration.

This phenomenon has become more pronounced in recent times in religious groups.

Read it all.   How it will end is anyone’s guess.   Incidentally along with this piece read Angelo Codevilla’s excellent analysis at American Spectator from earlier this summer of the ruling class vs. the country class.   It is, in my view, exactly the same phenomenon—some church leaders are in the ruling class.  Codevilla will help you see more clearly how the political landscape in the country has shifted as the country class rears its head.

One more thought:  I continue to be perplexed as to how the religious leaders promoting more immigration (more refugees and more illegal aliens) to supply cheap labor for business (see yesterday’s post for just one example), can justify being the handmaidens of big corporations.  Would someone please explain the rationale!

Wouldn’t the Christian thing to do be to work to improve the lives of people where they live rather then uproot them from their respective cultures and place them in meatpacking jobs, or, to live in American slums with no job?