01/10/12

Obama’s Transparent Hypocrisy in Harassing Arizona’s Sheriff Arpaio

By: Tom Tancredo
Gulag Bound

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County, Arizona

As part of the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona’s new law, SB 1070, President Obama’s lawyers had an Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement bureaucrat, Daniel Ragsdale, file a brief to the court against the state of Arizona. What Ragsdale said about immigration law enforcement gives the lie both to the Obama lawsuit and to their current attacks on Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

ICE bureaucrat Ragsdale argued that Arizona did not need SB 1070 because the Feds were already enforcing immigration law in the state. He even allowed for some cooperation with local officials. Ragsdale specifically noted that as part of the vigorous federal enforcement operation, “Phoenix …has a fugitive operations team, a robust criminal alien program, and it manages the 287(g) programs in the counties of Maricopa, Yavapai, and Pinal, as well as at the Arizona Department of Corrections.”

The 287(g) program was created by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. It authorized federal immigration authorities to train and deputize state and local law enforcement to fight illegal immigration.

Despite using the success of 287 (g) in Maricopa County (where 58% of the state’s residents live) as a justification for suing to invalidate SB1070, the Obama administration has now revoked the program as part of an all-out assault against Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Thomas Perez, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department

The justification for revoking the agreement comes from a 22-page letter written by Thomas Perez, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. The letter accuses Sheriff Joe of “discriminatory policing” and not giving enough bilingual services to Spanish speaking prisoners.

According to Perez, the letter to Arpaio is a result of a three-year-long investigation. The investigation was aided “by four leading police practice experts, one jail expert, and an expert on statistical analysis; we reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documentary evidence; toured [Maricopa County’s] jails; and interviewed over 400 individuals, including approximately 150 former and current… inmates, and more than 75 former and current [Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office] personnel.”

While Perez presumably included these details to argue that his investigation was thorough, what this really means is that he has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on this Obama witch-hunt. Perez gave Arpaio the option of allowing left wing bureaucrats in the Obama administration to micromanage his department, or face litigation.

Prior to working for Eric Holder and the Obama administration, Perez was on the board of Casa De Maryland. CASA is a National Council of La Raza affiliate organization that receives millions of dollars from George Soros and Hugo Chavez’s state run oil company. They have set up day labor centers for illegal aliens and even printed Spanish language pamphlets to encourage illegal aliens not to cooperate with the police or immigration authorities.

Perez’s main allegation is that Sheriff Joe is racially profiling in his enforcement of laws against illegal immigration. The principal basis for this is a statistical study that claims that Hispanics are more likely to be pulled over and searched by Arpaio’s Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies. However, the Obama administration refuses to give the data behind the study.

Even Robert Robb, a liberal columnist of the Arizona Republic, who previously accused Arpaio of running a “rogue agency,” wrote that “the letter is uncomfortably weak regarding evidence to back up its sweeping charges of pervasive racial discrimination.”

I should note that while Sheriff Joe is not racially profiling, the Supreme Court has ruled that ethnicity may be a legitimate factor in immigration enforcement. In the 1975 case United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled “the likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but, standing alone, it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens.”

No one is accusing Sheriff Joe of indiscriminately stopping all Hispanics and demanding their papers. But neither the Constitution, Supreme Court precedent, nor the truth, matters to the Obama/Holder Justice Department. Instead, they are determined not to enforce our immigration laws on the federal level and attack anyone who does the job on the local level.

Under the leadership of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, 25% of all deportation in the United States since 2007 came from Maricopa County. Arpaio’s success in identifying and deporting illegal aliens stands in sharp contrast to ICE’s weak enforcement across the rest of the nation. That success is an embarrassment to the federal immigration authorities, and this is why they are suing him and revoking his 287(g) authority. Apparently, Arizona’s enforcement efforts must be brought down the levels of New York and Chicago and other sanctuary cities.

A Department of Homeland Security press release claimed that even though they are breaking the agreement, “The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County.”

The hypocrisy and political motivation behind the Justice Department’s actions are both obvious and odious. If the Obama administration was serious about enforcing the law, they should be emulating Sheriff Joe across the country instead of harassing him.


It is our distinct honor to now carry the commentaries and reports of Tom Tancredo, former Representative to Congress of the State of Colorado and 2008 candidate for U.S. President. His CongressmanTomTancredo.com regularly features his articles, as does WorldNetDaily.

Former Congressman Tancredo currently serves as chairman of Rocky Mountain Foundation, co-chairman of the anti-illegal immigration Team America PAC, and honorary chairman of Youth for Western Civilization. He speaks frequently on cable news, talk radio, and on college campuses – where his mere presence has led leftists to riot on multiple occasions. His book, In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security was published in 2006.

01/10/12

US Communist Leader: “The Occupy Wall Street Movement Should Serve as a Wake Up Call to All Who Remain Committed to a Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Direction”

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

You may think the Occupy Wall Street movement is fading away. You may think that colder weather and tougher local authorities will see “Occupy” crumble into nothingness. You may think it was all much ado about nothing.

Well you may possibly be right, but the communist forces who have increasingly infiltrated the movement have a very different view.

To them “Occupy” signifies the beginning of the end of capitalism. “Occupy” is a sign  to Leninists the world over that we are entering revolutionary times and nothing will ever be the same again.

Larry Holmes

The following excerpts are from opening remarks by Larry Holmes, First Secretary of the pro-Cuba/North Korea Workers World Party, to the WWP national leadership meeting Dec. 17 in New York City.

We are in the opening stages of a wholly new epoch.

This epoch in all likelihood will be protracted and long. It will be uneven, it will be explosive, it will be fraught with dangers — all of it necessary to that which we have been waiting so long for: the awakening of our global proletariat, and especially the awakening of that section of the proletariat whose development we are responsible for — the working class of the U.S.

The epoch I am referring to is the beginning of the end of capitalism. The epoch will end with the destruction of capitalism and the expropriation of the capitalist class…

To Holmes, capitalism has come to the end of the road. It is the responsibility of Marxist-Leninists to hasten an inevitable process through organization and international solidarity.

The important point is that anti-capitalist consciousness is growing on a global basis. It is actually surging. Some of it is incipient, not well articulated; some of it is better articulated; some of it is articulated by those who are not real revolutionaries and who have another agenda with whom we have differences. All of that will be part of the terrain that we are developing and fighting.

The Party and the revolutionary movement and all who are moving in a revolutionary direction should not underestimate the depth of the radicalization of sections of the working class, especially the youth but not only the youth. Because radicalization, especially when it abets the struggle, becomes contagious.

And so, if the Party is ultimately going to play its role in helping our class to move toward what is sometimes called the maximum program — socialist revolution — it will be necessary for us to be very conscious, very meticulous and serious in how we go about it.

There are sections of the world capitalist class that are more aware than even the most militant sections of the working-class movement of the reality that this capitalist crisis is no “garden variety” crisis; but rather something infinitely more profound than all previous crises and more importantly, a crisis from which there is no way out.

This is no small matter because our class and its organizations cannot fight that which it does not fully understand. It goes without saying that we communists must assist the working class and the oppressed in defending all the gains, be they significant or meager gains, that are under relentless attack. However, let there be no illusions — the epochal class struggle that is in the making on a global level will not be resolved on the basis of concessions or reforms, or a return to some semblance of “capitalist stability.” Those days are over.

It is important, henceforth, for us to see the possibility of socialist revolution — no not tomorrow — but neither as merely some idea that has no relevance to the class struggle today. To truly understand how unprecedented and irreversible the present world capitalist crisis is, is to understand that the question of the need for world socialist revolution is not something that can be postponed.

Whatever other work the Party undertakes in the day-to-day class struggle, we will not be of help to our class and only cause more confusion, if we fail to illuminate the road to the socialist revolution.

Holmes sees Occupy Wall Street as an a re-energization of the revolutionary movement – young people not jaded by the sordid past failures of socialism, leading the way into a new and final revolutionary upsurge. Holmes admits that revolutionaries of his generation need to catch the new red tide or be left behind.

OWS has sharpened the crisis for the revolutionary movement. It is a crisis for us and our friends and allies. Why? Because even though we are ideologically ahead and can teach the best elements in the Occupy movement things they need to learn about imperialism, about the national question, about the woman question and on and on — in some ways they are ahead of us….

The Occupy Wall Street movement should serve as a wake up call to all who remain committed to a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist direction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the developments that led up to it, are easier to understand today as we can more fully appreciate the devastating toll of more than 30 years of worldwide counterrevolution.

Part of that devastating toll has been the degeneration and weakening of the revolutionary socialist orientation.

Degeneration does not happen all at once, overnight, but rather incrementally, almost unconsciously, over an extended period of time and under the pressure of disappointments and frustrations, the causes for which in large part can be traced to stagnation in the working-class movement, demoralization, contraction and fragmentation in the revolutionary movement, and the seemingly endless prevalence of bourgeois triumphalism — a prevalence that has clearly now come to an end.

In some ways, the young, inexperienced and ideologically eclectic makers of the Occupy movement, precisely because they are not burdened by the baggage of past defeats, understand the gravity of the global capitalist crisis and the revolutionary potential that it has opened better than many of us seasoned veteran revolutionary Marxists.

We will not be able to help the OWS movement advance until and unless we catch up to it.

New York WWP conference, November 2011

In my opinion, the spring and summer of 2012 will see a big upsurge in revolutionary movements all over Europe and North America.

Occupy Wall Street will be a big part of that movement. The Workers World Party and several other Marxist organizations involved will not allow it to die. They see the world on the verge of huge revolutionary change. The anarchists and malcontents who started the movement will remain, but leadership will increasingly fall into the hands of labor unions and highly organized and disciplined Marxist-Leninist elements.

01/10/12

Obama Reelection is America

By: Jeffrey Klein, Political Buzz Examiner
Examiner.com

In an amazing act of political and editorial courage, U.S. News and World Report published the results of its new “Washington Whispers” poll that surveyed “1,000 [American] Households,” asking them “what potential news event do you fear most in 2012?”

At 33 percent–the winner was: “President Obama Wins Reelection.”

According to Paul Bedard’s USNWR article from yesterday, titled “Poll: Americans, 2-1, Fear Obama’s Reelection,” Bedard wrote that … ‘many voters aren’t forgetting what they dislike about Obama and want him out of office.’

The magazine, which converted to a “digital” [online] format beginning with the January 2011 issue, is best know for its’ two annual print editions, “Best Colleges” and “Best Hospitals,” but, it is also been long known for being a liberal-leaning [mainstream media] publication.

So, how did this article and its poll results get published in President Obama’s ‘do-or-die’ reelection year?

It appears that Mr. Bedard may have wanted to single-handedly attempt to ‘dull’ the affects of these [devastating] poll results for ‘the [Democrat] team’, by using tactical fact placement and his own commentary, as an example, he wrote … ‘Next to Obama’s reelection, 31 percent of Americans said they feared higher taxes, which may be proof that the president’s focus on the payroll tax cut has hit pay dirt.’

Although well intentioned, Bedard missed the mark here. Most people commonly think in terms of “federal income tax [withholding]” when they think of higher taxes, just like that from a roll-back of the “Bush Tax Cuts.”

This is quite different from the entirely useless and blatantly temporary “payroll tax holiday”, which has produced no jobs, and has redirected badly needed financial resources away from the teetering Social Security Trust Fund–threatening its’ very solvency, and the probability of receiving benefits for the very people getting this short term “feel good” fix.

Then Bedard tried again, when he wrote:

‘The poll, however, held out some hope for Obama. Some 38 percent of younger Americans, 18-24, said their biggest fear was higher taxes. Just 28 percent of those same voters said they feared Obama winning in November.’

Once again, Bedard’s ball landed in the weeds.

As it is President Obama and the Democrats who steadfastly believe the country has a “revenue problem” versus a “spending problem,” then their approach to deficit [and national debt] reduction must include increased taxes–on everyone. It has been relentlessly proven that increasing taxes to whatever extent on top income earners alone will not do the job.

With that having been made clear, we can confidently combine the top two responses, from both age groups, which are higher taxes and Obama’s reelection, and translate that into a total Obama “fear factor” of 64 percent for adults, and 66 percent for young voting-age adults–virtually the same outcome.

Finally, to round out the remaining demographics, according to Bedard’s reporting on this poll, nearly half of all Americans aged 65 and older said Obama’s reelection was their top fear, with 39 percent of those making $75,000 or more in agreement.

A scant 16 percent said their greatest fear in 2012 was that Obama would not be reelected.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Jeffrey Klein

01/10/12

OBAMA’S NEW OMB DIRECTOR FOLDS UNDER PRESSURE IN SENATE COMMITTEE

Breitbart.tv:

With less than a month to go before President Obama is required by law to submit a budget to Congress (February 6th), Mr. Obama’s decision today to make Jack Lew White House chief of staff leaves deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Heather Higginbottom to take Mr. Lew’s place as the director of OMB.

As The Hill newspaper reports, Ms. Higginbottom has only served one month in her present role as deputy director of OMB and is considered a “controversial appointee” due to her thin–some would say “nonexistent”–budgetary resume. Prior to becoming deputy director of OMB, Ms. Higginbottom was a deputy policy adviser to President Obama and worked on his campaign as a policy director.

Read more at Big Government.