02/2/16

Conservatives Oppose Mass Criminal Release

With the presidential race the focus of most of the media attention, a major division among Senate Republicans over so-called “criminal justice reform” has gotten little attention. But the liberal media are now beginning to notice that conservatives are mounting a campaign to stop a piece of legislation that has been advertised as a major part of President Obama’s left-wing legacy.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) would release thousands of criminals back on the streets at a time of rising crime rates, in the name of reducing what liberals call “mass incarceration.”

In a major story on the new developments, The New York Times noted that the effort to pass the bill “has been driven by an unusual right-left alliance that includes the conservatives Charles G. and David H. Koch and the American Civil Liberties Union,” but that Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has now taken a strong leadership role against the bill.

In fact, the Koch brothers are libertarians, not conservatives.

Cotton told the Times, “I don’t believe we should allow thousands of violent felons to be released early from prison, nor do I believe we should reduce sentences for violent offenders in the future.”

A key development has been a triple murder committed by a convicted crack cocaine dealer who was back on the streets because his prison sentence on drug charges had already been reduced twice. The crimes were committed in Columbus, Ohio, and are now starting to get national media attention.

The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) reports that Wendell L. Callahan, who is charged with killing his ex-girlfriend and two of her children, twice benefited from changes in federal sentencing guidelines, which reduced his sentence by a total of more than four years. His ex-girlfriend, Erveena Hammonds, 32, and her daughters, Breya Hammonds, 7, and Anaesia Green, 10, were viciously stabbed to death.

The publication Politico cited the triple murder case as a major complicating factor in the effort to pass the bill.

A conservative organization called Americans for Limited Government is leading opposition to the bill, taking issue with Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) for working with Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to pass the controversial legislation.

The Times said, “Some analysts have suggested that it could help Republicans by broadening their appeal to independents, Democrats and minorities who believe that the criminal justice system is unfairly tilted.”

Cornyn seemed to accept this, telling the paper that Republicans should support the legislation to show that they care about people in prison and want to give them a second chance. “It doesn’t hurt to show that you actually care,” he said. “This is a statement that is not just symbolic, but actually shows that you care about people. It doesn’t hurt to show some empathy.”

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning countered, “Senator John Cornyn, whose sense of empathy must have developed at Washington, D.C. cocktail parties, should prove he truly cares for people whose neighborhoods have been ravaged by drugs and violent crimes by moving to one of those neighborhoods so he can see for himself the impact of releasing early thousands of hardened drug kingpins and violent criminals back on to the streets of America. Senator Cornyn’s ‘empathetic’ conscience needs to meet the reality of the street, where a 77 percent recidivism rate amongst released prisoners is the norm, with 25 percent of those crimes being violent in nature.”

The alleged killer in the Columbus case was released early from prison because Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced sentences for those in prison for dealing crack cocaine and directed the U.S. Sentencing Commission to amend federal sentencing guidelines to let drug dealers out of prison at an earlier date.

President Obama supports the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act legislation, as do many in the liberal media anxious to see a piece of “bipartisan” legislation pass and become a part of the Obama legacy.

In addition to Senators Cornyn and Lee pushing the Senate bill, Politico had previously reported that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) wanted the GOP to pass “criminal justice reform” in early 2016, and that he had said, “I think criminal justice reform is probably the biggest [issue] we can make a difference on… There’s a real way forward on that.”

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning called Ryan’s plan a “risky mass criminal release scheme” that comes at a time when “police are overwhelmed with record murders in cities like Baltimore and Chicago.”

There were 342 murders in Baltimore in 2015, an all-time high. There were 468 murders in Chicago, compared to 416 in 2014.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission had announced in July of 2014 that it was launching a plan to release 46,290 drug offenders from federal prisons.

Obama is already in the process of releasing 6,000 drug dealers from prison in what The New York Times calls “one of the largest discharges of inmates from federal prisons in American history.” Last December he issued 95 commutations, mostly to drug offenders.

On the Columbus Dispatch Facebook page, one citizen commented, “For all of you who thought Prez O [Obama] was so compassionate when he pushed for letting drug dealers out of prison early, well what do you think of Prez Hope and Change now?”

The Columbus Dispatch said that the alleged killer “likely would have been deep into a 12 1/2-year federal prison sentence if sentencing guidelines for convicted crack dealers had remained unchanged.” It added that “The changes to his federal sentence came as part of retroactive attempts by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to rectify sentencing disparities between dealers who sold crack and those who dealt powdered cocaine.”

A local citizen wrote to the paper to note, “Hammonds and her daughters should be living examples of how harsh sentences against drug dealers and violent criminals protect our welfare. Instead, they’ll be laid to rest as examples of a broken system.”

Despite the murders, liberal pressure groups are demanding that the Senate Republican majority pass S. 2123. In a release headlined, “Civil and Human Rights Coalition Urges Senate Republicans to Stay the Course on Sentencing Reform in 2016,” Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, referred to “recent reports” about divisions among Senate Republicans and urged the Senate GOP conference “to stay the course on passing a sentencing reform package in 2016.” The Senate Republican Conference is the organization of Republican members in the U.S. Senate and is chaired by Senator John Thune of South Dakota. Thune has been quoted as saying that criminal justice reform has a “better than 50/50” shot of passing Congress and reaching Obama’s desk.

“The window of opportunity is here,” said Henderson. He claimed passage of the “bipartisan bill” and Obama’s willingness to sign it into law “is a rare chance to show the country that Washington can both reduce the size of government and protect its citizens all at once.”

The phrase “reducing the size of government” means cutting the cost of prisons. But the idea of “protecting” people by releasing criminals doesn’t make a lot of sense to law-and-order conservatives and the public at-large.

11/7/15

The Soros-Koch Brothers Criminals Lobby

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

The Soros-Koch Brothers Criminals Lobby

At a time of rising crime across the nation, Dr. Tina Trent exposes how George Soros and the Koch Brothers have joined forces to empty the prisons of illegal aliens and other criminals. Trent says the Koch Brothers are libertarians, not conservatives, and that “They’re more like George Soros than not.” The bills they are pushing are S. 2123 and H.R. 3713. Trent, an advocate for victims of crime, says the “criminal justice reform” legislation will modify the mandatory minimum sentences that have been put hardened criminals in jail and reduced crime. But many conservatives are silent about this because they take Koch Brothers money.

11/4/15

Empty the Prisons Bill Now on Fast Track

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

We are witnessing a carefully orchestrated political and media campaign to pass the George Soros-backed Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (S.2123) on the grounds that it is “bipartisan.” But critics are calling it a soft-on-crime bill that will backfire on the Republicans who help pass it.

A big hole in the congressional process to rush the bill through to full approval in the Senate has been exposed by a former prosecutor who says victims of crime were not given a chance to be heard.

The former prosecutor, Mary Leary, is a professor at Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C. She has written a scathing review of the bill and the process underway to pass it, saying, “The president and Congress need to reach out to victims. The president has gone all the way to Oklahoma to meet with prisoners. Perhaps he should take a walk in Washington and meet with one of the victims of the over 40,000 crimes that occurred there in 2014 or speak to the families affected by a homicide rate that has increased over 47 percent since last year.”

The same criticism applies to the senators who passed the bill.

Despite the flaws, the following papers have weighed in with editorials in favor of the legislation:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Los Angeles Times
Cedar Rapids Gazette (IA)
Waco Herald Tribune (TX)
Kansas City Star
Santa Rosa Press Democrat (CA)
Indianapolis Star

The Waco Herald Tribune made a correct point, however, in noting that “the reforms were pressed hard by both the politically powerful Koch brothers as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.”

But while the Koch brothers did give $5 million to the Coalition for Public Safety, a group that met with former Attorney General Eric Holder to push “criminal justice reform,” it is the left-wing billionaire, George Soros, who has really been behind the campaign. He gave the ACLU $50 million in 2014 “to end mass incarceration.”

We noted in a previous article that one Soros-funded group, Critical Resistance, was founded by communist Angela Davis and says it seeks “to end the prison industrial complex” by “challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.”

We thought the group had only received $100,000 from Soros. It turns out the organization got $200,000 from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations in the year 2000, $200,000 in 2002, and another $100,000 in 2009.

Dr. Tina Trent, an advocate for victims of crime, was writing about the campaign for “criminal justice reform” when it was primarily underwritten by Soros and before the Koch brothers started pouring millions of dollars into it. She discovered that the group Critical Resistance had invented the “cop-watch concept” that would be popularized by Van Jones in Oakland, California, through a group called Bay Area Police Watch. Angela Davis wrote, Are Prisons Obsolete?, a book arguing that criminals are victims of capitalist society.

Van Jones would later become Obama’s so-called Green Jobs Czar, only to resign when his communist background came to light. He is now working with Koch Industries to promote the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015.

As a commentator on CNN, Jones has also been promoting the bill, calling it a “smart” way to deal with crime. “By year’s end,” he writes, “President Barack Obama could sign into law major criminal justice reforms—passed because of the leadership and full engagement of the congressional GOP.”

If so, it would be a major victory for George Soros and the Democratic Party.

In total, according to “prisoner rights advocate” Christopher Zoukis, George Soros and his Open Society Foundations have “invested” more than $200 million in the past decade toward “reform of criminal justice policies.”

The evidence is mounting that Senate Republicans voting for the bill have walked into a trap set by the leftists. Jonathan Keim, Counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, advises Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell not to bring the bill up for a vote. He writes, “…why would Senate leaders bother bringing it to a vote when the fault-lines established by the opposing Senators would expose Republicans to charges of being ‘soft on crime’ in the upcoming election?”

Those opposing senators, as we reported, include Republicans Ted Cruz (TX), Orrin Hatch (UT), David Perdue (GA), Jeff Sessions (AL) and David Vitter (LA).

But other conservatives are making their voices known, such as Dan Cadman of the Center for Immigration Studies, who says the bill could result in illegal aliens being released from prison to prey on innocent Americans.

He writes about S.2123, “…there is nothing in the bill to ensure that released alien prisoners will be detained during the entire pendency of deportation proceedings. In fact, it is entirely possible that in some instances alien prisoners whose actual time served is substantially lessened by the provisions of S.2123 may find themselves in a position to go before the immigration court and ask for relief from removal because they will no longer face statutory debarment under various provisions of the immigration laws, as would have happened had they been obliged to serve the original sentence.”

If Congressional Republicans pass the bill, it would not only be a major victory for President Obama but likely also for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton “made it [incarceration] the centerpiece of her first major policy address since officially declaring her candidacy in a speech Wednesday at Columbia University in New York City,” gushed Leonard Noisette at the website of the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations back in April.

Noisette went on: “Clinton’s speech followed a front-page story in the New York Times noting an unusual consensus among Democrats and Republicans in the 2016 presidential race on the need for criminal justice reform. New alliances are being formed between such politically disparate groups as the Center for American Progress and the Koch Brothers. Indeed, these issues are fostering a spirit of bipartisan cooperation seldom seen in our ideologically polarized politics of late.”

Isn’t it interesting that Clinton chose that theme after The New York Times pumped it up as a major issue?

While the Koch brothers may have funded some good free-market causes over the years, the issue of “criminal justice reform” has clearly been hijacked by the left.

The Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities USA are among the groups endorsing the bill. They cited the comments of Pope Francis, made in a talk with prisoners at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility outside Philadelphia. Pope Francis said, “This time in your life can only have one purpose: to give you a hand in getting back on the right road, to give you a hand to help you rejoin society. All of us are a part of that effort, all of us are invited to encourage, help and enable your rehabilitation.”

They added, “We join the Holy Father by advocating for reforms to our nation’s criminal justice policies that lead to mercy, healing and restoration.”

The only reference to crime victims comes in this part of the letter: “Our Catholic tradition supports the community’s right to establish and enforce laws that protect people and advance the common good. But our faith also teaches us that both victims and offenders have a God-given dignity that calls for justice and restoration, not vengeance.”

Hence, offenders are, in effect, being treated as victims by these liberal Catholic groups.

Leary, the professor at Catholic University, spoke for many Catholics when she voiced concerns that the victims of crime have not been heard, as S.2123 has been marked up and passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

She wrote that “…apparently no one in the Senate thought it appropriate to hear what victims have to say about criminal justice reform. Last year, about 1.17 million violent crimes and nearly 8.3 million property crimes were reported to law enforcement. The victims of that criminal activity are the people who bear the direct and secondary harm. That is not all. It is not just that victims were not included as witnesses; they were barely even mentioned. A review of the written testimony of all nine witnesses indicates that the word ‘victim’ or any derivative thereof was used a mere nine times.”

But no advocate for victims of crimes testified.

She added, “Although the Judiciary Committee saw it appropriate to include representatives from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, prison ministers and lawyers, it did not apparently see it necessary to include the people most affected by crime through no fault of their own—victims.”

Families Against Mandatory Minimums is another Soros-funded group, having received $600,000 from his Open Society Foundations in 2012, $200,000 in 2008, and $400,000 in 2007.

Leary is a former prosecutor and attorney who has focused on crimes against women and children, including the exploitation of children and women, child pornography, child prostitution, computer facilitated crimes against children, and family violence cases.

In her National Law Journal article about the flaws in the bill, she noted that Congress passed the Crime Victims Rights Act in 2004, giving victims the right to be “reasonably heard” at public court proceedings.

“This same Congress should recognize that right in this context and allow victims to be ‘reasonably heard’ regarding” the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, she said. “Not only is it reasonable to listen to crime victims, but it is necessary for any criminal justice reform to be legitimate.”

07/17/15

How the Republicans Plan to Lose to Hillary

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A new survey from Univision, the pro-Mexico television network, demonstrates the utter folly of Republicans appealing to Hispanic voters. It finds that 68 percent have a favorable view of Hillary Clinton despite the scandals swirling around her. By contrast, only 36 percent have a favorable view of former Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican and speaks Spanish.

Bush “was the highest-rated of all the Republican candidates,” Univision reports, with Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a one-time proponent of amnesty for illegals, coming in second with only a 35 percent approval rate.

What the poll demonstrates is that Hispanics are basically owned by the Democratic Party. The Democrats’ power grab for the Latino vote has been successful. However, ultimately the Democratic Party’s success in the presidential election depends on convincing Republicans to fruitlessly continue to appeal to Hispanics, while abandoning the GOP voter base of whites, conservatives and Christians.

Overall, in terms of political party affiliation, 57 percent of Hispanics identified themselves as Democrats and only 18 percent said they are Republicans. A total of 25 percent called themselves independent.

In another finding, 59 percent of Hispanic voters said they were satisfied with Barack Obama’s presidency after his six years in office. Clearly, most Hispanics have drunk the Kool-Aid. For them, it appears that federal benefits and legalization of border crossers are what matters. Most of them don’t bat an eye in regard to Obama’s lawless and traitorous conduct of domestic and foreign policy.

What the Republicans have left is to try to appeal to white, conservative and Christian voters. But that strategy, of course, runs the obvious risk of being depicted by the liberal media as racist. After all, whites are not supposed to have a “white identity,” as Jared Taylor’s book by that name describes.

Whites cannot have a racial identity, but Hispanics and blacks can. This is one aspect of political correctness. As communists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who are themselves white, put it in their book, it is a “race course against white supremacy.”

If Republicans pander to Hispanics, they will alienate their voter base, which has shown in their reaction to the Donald Trump candidacy that they want more—not less—action taken to control the border with Mexico. Republican Senator John McCain (AZ) calls the Trump supporters “crazies,” an indication that the GOP establishment would rather jettison these people than bring them into the Republican camp. Like McCain, former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has also attacked Trump, saying his remarks about criminal aliens are hurting the GOP. It’s amazing how a loser like Romney, who also threw in the towel on gay marriage when he was governor of Massachusetts, continues to generate press. What he is saying is what the liberal media want to hear.

Of course, the political correctness which dominates the national dialogue and debate also means that Republicans like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are likely to continue to demonize Trump, thereby alienating many whites. As a result, the Republicans will get less of the conservative and Christian vote, further diminishing their chances of winning the White House. It will be a replay of the losing campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Republicans have already alienated many Christian voters by giving up the fight for traditional marriage. They had planned to abandon border control as an issue until Trump and “El Chapo” got in the way.

Meanwhile, in another amazing turnaround, Republicans on Capitol Hill are backing Obama’s call for “sentencing reform,” a strategy that will empty the prisons and increase the crime rate, thereby alienating GOP voters in favor of law and order.

As this scenario plays out, Mrs. Clinton is coming across on the Democratic side looking like a moderate, by virtue of the fact that an open socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), is running “to her left” for the Democratic nomination.

The Clinton-Sanders show has all the earmarks of a carefully staged demonstration of the Marxist dialectic, an exercise designed to create the appearance of conflict in order to force even more radical change on the American people through Democratic Party rule.

Anybody who knows anything about Hillary, a student of Saul Alinsky, understands that her “moderation” is only a façade. Her thesis on Alinsky for Wellesley College was titled “There Is Only the Fight…” That is the Marxist strategy. It is the Alinsky version of the Marxist dialectic. It was also adopted by Obama, who was trained by Alinsky disciples working with the Catholic Church in Chicago.

In my column, “Study Marxism to Understand Hillary,” I noted that Barbara Olson had come to the conclusion while researching her book on Hillary that “she has a political ideology that has its roots in Marxism.” Olson noted, “In her formative years, Marxism was a very important part of her ideology…”

This means that Mrs. Clinton understands that the Sanders candidacy actually supports and does not undermine her own candidacy. It makes Hillary look like a moderate while she moves further to the left, a place she wants to be, in response to the left-wing Democratic base. Only the Marxist insiders seem to understand what is happening.

Some uninformed commentators refer to something called “Clintonism,” a supposed moderate brand of Democratic Party politics. If that ever existed, it applied to Bill Clinton and not Hillary.

The fact is that Sanders and Mrs. Clinton have associated with the same gang of communists and fellow travelers for many years. Sanders was an active collaborator with the Communist Party-sponsored U.S. Peace Council.

As for Hillary, Barbara Olson reported in her book Hell to Pay that Robert Borosage, who served as director of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), was “a colleague and close acquaintance” of Clinton. Olson wrote that Mrs. Clinton operated in the “reaches of the left including Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford,” who had been “committed Communists” and “Stalinists.” Olson said that Hillary worked for Treuhaft and paved the way for Mitford to lobby then-Governor Bill Clinton on the death penalty issue.

Olson described Hillary as a “budding Leninist” who understood the Leninist concept of acquiring, accumulating and maintaining political power at any cost. She wrote that “Hillary has never repudiated her connection with the Communist movement in America or explained her relationship with two of its leading adherents. Of course, no one has pursued these questions with Hillary. She has shown that she will not answer hard questions about her past, and she has learned that she does not need to—remarkable in an age when political figures are allowed such little privacy.”

Researcher Carl Teichrib has provided me with a photo of a Hillary meeting with Cora Weiss from the May 2000 edition of “Peace Matters,” the newsletter of the Hague Appeal for Peace. Weiss, a major figure in the Institute for Policy Studies, gained notoriety for organizing anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and traveling to Hanoi to meet with communist leaders. In the photo, Hillary is shown fawning over a Hague Appeal for Peace gold logo pin that Weiss is wearing.

Teichrib, editor of Forcing Change, recalls being an observer at the 1999 World Federalist Association (WFA) conference, held in association with the Hague Appeal for Peace, during which everyone in attendance was given an honorary membership into the WFA. In addition to collaborating with the pro-Hanoi Hague Appeal for Peace, the WFA staged a “Mission to Moscow” and held several meetings with the Soviet Peace Committee for the purpose of “discussing the goal of general and complete disarmament” and “the strengthening of the United Nations.” Mrs. Clinton spoke to a WFA conference in a tribute to veteran newsman Walter Cronkite, a supporter of world government

In the WFA booklet, “The Genius of Federation: Why World Federation is the Answer to Global Problems,” the group described how a “world federation,” a euphemism for world government, could be achieved by advancing “step by step toward global governance,” mostly by enhancing the power and authority of U.N. agencies.

Obama’s Iran deal continues this strategy by placing enormous power in the hands of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

At this stage in the campaign, even before the first Republican presidential debate, we can already see how the race is playing out. Hillary is counting on the Republicans nominating another loser with a losing strategy while she moves to the left and looks like a moderate.

Alinsky would be proud.

06/4/15

Jeh Johnson Responsible for Illegal Criminal Release

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.org

The House is taking some positive steps this year as they did last by taking away Obama’s money defending the illegals.

House votes to block Obama legal defense on immigration actions yet Jeh Johnson is acting quietly on his own. Just consider what Jeh Johnson did in 2013 releasing thousands of prisoners.

The Department of Homeland Security has a National Terrorism Advisory System that states on the website they effectively communicate information about terrorists threats to the public. The website even asks for your help. Then they have the nerve to have a fact sheet on the ‘broken’ immigration system where suggestions are noted that through Executive Orders, the ‘brokenness’ can be fixed.

So, releasing almost 4000 level 1 foreign national criminals from prison to roam our streets is the answer? Would this include those that are domestic ISIS terrorists?

3,700 illegal immigrant ‘Threat Level 1’ criminals released into U.S. by DHS

Most of the illegal immigrant criminals Homeland Security officials released from custody last year were discretionary, meaning the department could have kept them in detention but chose instead to let them onto the streets as their deportation cases moved through the system, according to new numbers from Congress.

Some of those released were the worst of the worst — more than 3,700 “Threat Level 1” criminals, who are deemed the top priority for deportation, were still released out into the community even as they waited for their immigration cases to be heard.

Homeland Security officials have implied their hands are tied by court rulings in many cases, but the numbers, obtained by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, showed 57 percent of the criminals released were by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own choice, and they could have been kept instead.

“Put aside the spin, and the fact is that over 17,000 of the criminal aliens released last year were released due to ICE discretion, representing 57 percent of the releases,” said Mr. Goodlatte. “The Obama administration’s lax enforcement policies are reckless and needlessly endanger our communities.”

In a statement to The Washington Times, ICE said it takes release decisions seriously and makes a judgment in each case. That holds true even for Threat Level 1 criminals.

“Not all Level 1 criminal aliens are subject to mandatory detention and thus may be eligible for bond,” the agency said, pointing to mitigating circumstances that can convince agents to release the most serious criminals.

“ICE personnel making custody determinations also take into consideration humanitarian factors such as deteriorated health, advanced age, and caretaking responsibilities. All custody determinations are made on a case-by-case basis taking into consideration the totality of circumstances in each case,” the agency said.

ICE officials insist that those who are released are still monitored, often by electronic ankle bracelets but also through a system of phone checks or by paying a bond.

However, nearly all of those released under electronic monitoring broke the terms of their release, according to ICE numbers.

In fiscal year 2014, ICE put about 41,000 immigrants through electronic monitoring, and more than 30,000 of them broke the terms of their release — many of them racking up multiple violations. All told, they notched nearly 300,000 violations in one year alone, or an average of 10 instances per violator.

The rate has gone down slightly so far in fiscal year 2015. Of the 34,002 immigrants put into electronic monitoring, 27,317 have broken the rules a combined 162,322 times.

ICE said violations can include what they deem minor problems, such as someone lacking a strong enough cell signal for voice verification by phone or someone calling in too early or a few minutes late. Low batteries or jostling an electronic bracelet during sports can also cause a monitoring alarm to go off incorrectly, ICE said.

Of the more than 30,000 detainees who broke the conditional terms of their release and monitoring in 2014, only 2,420 were deemed to have been serious enough breaches to rearrest them.

Part of ICE’s problem is that it doesn’t have enough beds to go out and pick up violators, according to an inspector general’s report released earlier this year.

Agency officials said they would like to be able to hold those who willfully break the rules, but they haven’t requested more beds. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s 2016 budget request actually asked for fewer beds to hold detainees next year, arguing that he wants to put more emphasis on the very alternatives that are being violated.

ICE’s treatment of those awaiting their deportation proceedings has been controversial for several years.

In 2013, the agency released 36,007 convicted criminals who were awaiting the outcome of their deportation cases. Those released had amassed 116 homicide convictions, 15,635 drunken driving convictions and 9,187 convictions stemming from what ICE labeled involvement with “dangerous drugs.”

The total dropped to about 30,000 in 2014 — but the seriousness of the offenses increased, with 193 homicide convictions among the detainees and 16,070 drunken driving convictions. There were also 426 sexual assaults and 303 kidnapping convictions, ICE said.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and ICE Director Sarah Saldana said the numbers were unacceptable and imposed new rules requiring releases to be vetted by senior agency officials to make sure they were correct.

Both Mr. Johnson and Ms. Saldana also said many of the releases are required and give them little discretion — particularly those made under a 2001 Supreme Court decision known as the Zadvydas case, when the justices ruled that immigrants couldn’t generally be detained indefinitely.

That means that if a home country won’t take someone back, ICE must release them after about six months.

But the new numbers obtained by Mr. Goodlatte suggest Zadvydas-related releases were fewer than 2,500 in 2014, or only about 8 percent of the total — compared to the 57 percent that ICE admits were completely discretionary.

The rest of the releases were divided between cases where an immigration judge ordered bond or where ICE was unable to obtain travel documents but it wasn’t considered a mandatory release under the Zadvydas ruling.

04/30/15

Black Mom Changes Leftist Narrative on Violence

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The reaction among responsible black and white law-abiding citizens to the black thugs rioting in Baltimore was captured by Toya Graham, the black mother who smacked her son around when she found him on the streets joining the attacks on police. Even liberals in the major media applauded her efforts.

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” she told CBS News, referring to her son and the black youth who died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody.

CBS reported, “Graham, a single mom with six children, denounced the vandalism and violence against police officers. She said rioting in Baltimore is no way to go about getting justice for Freddie Gray and that she doesn’t want that life for her son.”

Graham then appeared on the CBS This Morning Show to discuss the incident and the struggle to raise her children.

The important teaching moment represented by this dramatic incident, a brief moment of sanity in the media, undercut the left-wing effort to somehow blame the police for the riots. As a result, the “progressives” had to go on the attack against the black mother.

Over at Think Progress, the blog of the pro-Obama Center for American Progress, Graham was attacked as a “misguided” mother who exercised bad judgment in holding her son accountable. Writer Kira Lerner said the issue was alleged police violence, not rioting in the streets by black youth.

She quoted a woman with a group opposed to “police brutality” as saying that “While she doesn’t condone the looting that was highlighted by the media in Baltimore Monday night, she said she understands where the violent protesters are coming from.”

Meanwhile, over at Hot Air, a piece by Noah Rothman ran under the headline, “Don’t let urban unrest derail conservative criminal justice reform.” While the riots were underway, he insisted that “a consensus opinion” had emerged on both the left and the right in favor of getting soft on criminals and letting more of them out of prison.

In the wake of what has happened in Baltimore and Ferguson, the Republican primary electorate might be tempted to embrace a “tough on crime” candidate, but “That would be a mistake,” Rothman informed Hot Air readers.

What’s more, he lectured them, the war on drugs has “failed” and there is no alternative to letting “non-violent offenders” out of prison.

In fact, the war on drugs did not fail. David Evans, a special advisor to the Drug Free America Foundation, notes that marijuana use went down among young people by 25 percent from the advent of the Reagan administration’s “Just Say No” campaign to the inauguration of President Obama. “If we had had a reduction in any other health problem in the U.S. of 25 percent, we would consider it an outstanding success,” he said.

Being “tough on crime” is precisely what many observers, including that courageous Baltimore mom, have concluded needs to be done in the inner cities.

Going soft was precisely what the Baltimore mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, had done, accounting for the weak police response to the riots. Former police officer Michael Tremoglie points out that the Baltimore police knew that the mayor had said she wanted “protesters” protected and room furnished for them to “destroy,” and that “They knew that the DOJ [Department of Justice] was ‘monitoring’ what was occurring during the riots.”

Before he came to Hot Air, a site owned by Salem Communications, a Christian firm, Rothman had sung the praises of the pro-marijuana voices in the media such as MSNBC’s Touré. On another occasion, he had highlighted how comedian Kevin Hart and rapper Ice Cube had attacked commentator Nancy Grace’s anti-marijuana comments.

Hot Air, which claims to be the most heavily-trafficked conservative blog on the Internet, has emerged as a forum for pro-marijuana and soft-on-crime viewpoints, most of them articulated by Rothman, a former libertarian writer for Mediaite.

It is certainly true that the Rothman perspective on “criminal justice reform” has been embraced on the left.

As Accuracy in Media noted recently, in an article about a “criminal justice reform” conference held in Washington, D.C., there is a White House-directed effort to enlist conservatives to join with various progressive organizations to weaken laws against a series of violent and non-violent crimes.

Hillary Clinton joined the campaign on Wednesday, saying that “It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration.”

Some readers at Hot Air were astounded by the advice given by Rothman, who cited the Obama Justice Department as a reliable source of information on criminal justice issues, including alleged police violence.

One said, “Isn’t it great when we can come to Hot Air to read some halfwit ‘conservative’ columnist agree with Eric Holder about root causes?”

Another said, “I don’t think this is a very timely post. At least not whilst the animals are burning, looting, robbing, raping, killing each other and forming alliances with opposing gang bangers to destabilize the structure of society.”

Still another called attention to Heather MacDonald’s piece in the New York Post, “The Perilous New Push to Excuse Lawlessness,” as being “a hundred times better than Noah’s.” The writer said, “She’s an actual conservative who lived through the times when ‘law and order’ were questionable values, and conservatives had to fight hard to implement them.”

MacDonald had referred to “a wide-ranging movement [which] is already under way to transform the criminal justice system in order to avoid a disparate impact on blacks.” But since blacks commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, she said that fulfilling this promise “would require gutting murder statutes, and most other criminal laws,” and that the country’s two-decade-long crime drop would be in jeopardy.

Despite cities like Ferguson and Baltimore going up in flames and the rare story of a mother like Toya Graham making a plea for law-and-order, the liberal media are going to make sure that the movement for criminals’ rights that now operates under the goal of achieving “criminal justice reform” will get the lion’s share of the publicity.

Indeed, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” just ran a favorable story about the “Coalition for Public Safety,” which is trying to make the ACLU sound like a reasonable organization conservatives can work with. Based on what was reported, it looks like some conservative groups are taking the bait.

04/4/15

The Soros-Koch Criminals Lobby

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

The Koch Brothers are working hand-in-glove with the Obama Administration and the “progressives” to empty the prisons. Van Jones, a former activist with the group, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), has emerged as a point man for Koch Industries in a multi-million dollar campaign for “criminal justice reform.” This campaign used to be financed by billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros. Watch this show to understand how Republicans like Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are part of this effort.

03/30/15

Marxist Van Jones Praises Koch Brothers

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

When he left the Obama Administration in disgrace, the expectation was that “former” communist Van Jones would return to Oakland, California, and resume his duties as an anti-police street activist. Instead, Jones, a former activist with the group, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), was hired as a “liberal” co-host of a new version of CNN’s debate show “Crossfire.” Now, Jones has emerged as a point man for Koch Industries in a multi-million dollar campaign for “criminal justice reform.”

The spectacle of Jones appearing at a podium emblazoned with the company name “Koch Industries” became a reality last Thursday when the ACLU and the billionaire Koch brothers joined forces to sponsor an all-day “Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform.” Jones orchestrated most of the conference, serving as a moderator and speaker.

While the conference included a few Republicans, there was clear evidence that the new “bipartisan” campaign is being directed from the Obama White House. Attorney General Eric Holder and senior White House officials had met with several prominent leaders of the effort on March 2.

In addition to Jones, who was forced to resign as White House “Green Jobs Czar” after his extremist background came to light, Holder was a featured speaker, calling for “a fundamental shift in our criminal justice system,” and “historic change.”

Known for his lawless actions, such as refusing to enforce federal anti-drug laws, Holder was held in contempt by Congress for withholding documents from them about Fast and Furious, the scandal involving a gun-running operation that put deadly weapons in the hands of narcotics traffickers from Mexico. He is also known for the “open borders” policy that has prevented a vigorous enforcement of immigration laws on the federal and state level.

Addressing an audience of about 500 people, Holder spoke of a “rare consensus emerging across the country,” adding, “Recently, we have seen conservative stakeholders like Koch Industries and Americans for Tax Reform join with progressive voices like the Center for American Progress to form a new coalition dedicated to this cause.”

The “cause,” based on what we witnessed at the all-day event, is to reduce prison populations in the name of fiscal restraint and liberal compassion.

The financial support from the Koch brothers gives this left-wing campaign a bipartisan appearance and may be intended to buy some goodwill from the “progressives” who normally target these billionaires.

But knowing of Holder’s involvement in the event and the evidence that he, in fact, helped orchestrate this conference, it was troubling to some conservative observers that members of Congress, such as Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Republican governors such as Nathan Deal of Georgia, participated in this event.

Holder argued that the criminal justice system was racist against minorities, while Deal said the system was too costly and that many criminals can be re-educated, rehabilitated and released.

Although Americans for Tax Reform was indeed listed as a sponsor, its head, Grover Norquist, was in the news for another reason. He is embroiled in a controversy over his alleged ties to Islamists, and gave an interview to Glenn Beck defending himself against the charges.

The Center for American Progress, another major player in the new “criminal justice reform” effort, is funded by the Open Society Foundations of billionaire hedge-fund operator George Soros.

The new group Holder spoke about is called the Coalition for Public Safety, financed by $5 million from the Koch brothers and other “core supporters,” such as the liberal Ford Foundation. The group is run by Christine Leonard, a former Ted Kennedy Senate staffer once affiliated with the left-wing Vera Institute for Justice.

The Vera Institute is so extreme that its Project Concern had a National Advisory Board on Adolescent Development, Safety and Justice that included the former communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn as an adviser from 1998 to 2003. Dohrn was accused of bombing a police station and killing a San Francisco police sergeant. However, she has never been brought to justice for her alleged role in this crime.

Though it tilted heavily toward the left, the new coalition and the conference had a sprinkling of conservatives, most notably former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. His firm, “Gingrich Productions,” was an official sponsor. Gingrich apparently became a friend of Van Jones when they appeared together on CNN’s “Crossfire.” Other conservatives or libertarians in attendance included Matt Kibbe, President/CEO of FreedomWorks, and Tim Head, Executive Director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

In a joint statement, Gingrich and Jones declared, “Our over-reliance on prisons has failed America. It is past time for both political parties to come together and fix a bad system of their own making. We believe this moment offers a once-in-a generation opportunity for reforms that will save entire communities and transform the lives of millions of Americans. We must not let it pass.”

However, the well-documented book, Why Crime Rates Fell, by John E. Conklin, argues persuasively that crime reduction is due in large measure to putting more criminals in prison.

On one panel at the event, John Malcolm of The Heritage Foundation disputed the liberal notion advanced by Nicole Austin-Hillery of the Brennan Center for Justice that increased incarceration had no role in the drop in crime. He noted that economist Steven Levitt has estimated that approximately 25 percent of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to increased incarceration, and that Professor William Spelman has estimated that increased incarceration may be responsible for as much as 35 percent of the reduction in violent crime.

Following Governor Nathan Deal as a speaker was Piper Kerman, a convicted drug-money launderer who wrote, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, a book made into a television series by Netflix.

Dr. Tina Trent, an advocate for victims of crime, is watching this campaign go forward with a lot of questions and suspicion. She was writing about the campaign for “criminal justice reform” when it was primarily underwritten by Soros. She discovered that the group, Critical Resistance, a Soros-funded activist group founded by long-time communist Angela Davis, had invented the “cop-watch concept” that would be popularized by Jones in Oakland through a group called Bay Area Police Watch. Davis wrote, Are Prisons Obsolete?, a book arguing that criminals are victims of capitalist society.

Trent says the campaign is well underway and aims to eliminate the death penalty, life without parole sentences, “three strikes” laws, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and other changes that states have passed over the last 20 years to reduce violent crime. Another goal is to expand voting rights for felons, who are expected to show their gratitude by voting Democratic.

She says the movement also aims to “ban the box”—a reference to removing the criminal record question from job applications—and legalize dangerous mind-altering drugs. In this context, the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance was another “partner” in the “bipartisan summit.”

Trent has also highlighted the Soros-funded effort to “radicalize” prisoners while they are incarcerated.

The campaign to target the prisons for revolutionary purposes is actually an old one. The House Internal Security Committee in 1973 published a report, “Revolutionary Target: The American Penal System,” which examined how “groups committed to Marxist revolutionary theories and tactics were exploiting the popular issue of prison reform and had become a source of the unrest then afflicting many of the nation’s prisons.”

A different approach and analysis of what has to be done about the crime problem is being taken by veteran journalist Colin Flaherty, in his new book, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry. Flaherty argues that the Obama/Holder narrative of the alleged “racial victimization” of blacks by whites ignores the black-on-white violence that has become an epidemic across the country.

Rather than empty the prisons, he argues, more criminals need to be apprehended and punished.

Black crime rates are “astronomically out of proportion” to their presence in the population, he points out. But the media “ignore, condone and deny it.” Obama, he adds, is a “willing partner” in the deception.

03/28/15

New Marxist Target: The Prisons

By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

The Koch Brothers are financing a “progressive” plan to empty the prisons. America’s Survival, Inc. has the exclusive story in this blockbuster video. See how Marxist Van Jones has become the Koch Brothers’ point man in this insidious campaign. Watch Eric Holder praise Koch Industries by name.

01/14/15

Notorious Red Exploits King Legacy

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Janel Davis of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a “noted scholar, author and veteran civil rights activist” by the name of Angela Davis will deliver the keynote address January 18 at Kennesaw State University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance. This is the same Angela Davis “who supported the imprisonment of Soviet political dissidents (calling them common criminals), cheered on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize (formerly the International Stalin Peace Prize) by communist East Germany,” as noted by another paper, the British Telegraph.

The differences reflect the abysmal state of our media today, as compared to a foreign newspaper that conducted some basic research. Janel Davis is obviously a young reporter who has not been trained to properly investigate a subject she is writing about. As a result, she misleads her audience and makes a fool out of herself.

A photograph of Davis shaking hands with the Stalinist East German dictator, Erich Honecker, is not that difficult to find on the Internet.

Davis, a two-time candidate for vice-president on the Communist Party ticket, is getting paid $20,000 by Kennesaw State University for giving a speech. Earlier in her career she beat a murder rap and was a college professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In a 2012 speech, she spoke of the “planetary euphoria” she felt when Barack Obama was elected president. Davis said Obama’s presidency had resulted in “an upsurge of activism” that would not have taken place “if the Republican candidate had been elected.”

In addition to the International Lenin Peace Prize, she received an honorary degree from the Karl Marx University of Leipzig, East Germany.

The transformation of a communist apologist for the old Soviet Union and East Germany into a “scholar” and “civil rights activist” is on the same level as Davis pretending to be a working class hero while making big bucks on the lecture circuit. Nevertheless, she still talks and acts like a communist true believer and participated in the “Occupy” movement at events in various cities.

Those who believe communism is dead might be surprised to learn that in 2012 she gave a speech calling for “combating anti-communism.” At the same time, she has adopted the cause of radical Islam, declaring “Islamophobia” to be a major threat, the communist People’s World reported.

The paper went on to say that Davis “spoke at length about [the] centrality of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people to the discontent in the Muslim world,” and challenged the audience to recognize “that Israeli apartheid…is just as bad” as South African apartheid.

Davis concluded her address by saying that “we need peace, justice, equality, and socialism for us all.”

A Google search finds that Davis’s Marxist speeches are being offered for fees that range from $10,000 to $20,000. It looks like Kennesaw, located about 20 miles outside Atlanta, got stuck with the higher rate.

Most of those offering her services as a speaker provide an extreme make-over of her career, in order to mask her decades of serving the interests of the secret police in the Soviet Union and East Germany.

For example, the American Program Bureau calls Davis a “Feminist & Writer,” whose topics include “The Role of Art in Society.”

The Keppler Speakers Bureau calls her a “living legend” who will “recount her experience as one of the country’s most prominent activists for social justice.”

The Lavin Agency calls Davis a “Legendary Human Rights Activist” who is “internationally known for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad.”

The latter claim is most definitely a lie, since Davis was an ardent proponent of the Soviet/East German system of oppression and ignored the victims of communism—some 100 million of them.

Now Davis is claiming the mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King, a man honored by Americans for his commitment to peaceful change. Many young blacks may be duped into believing that Davis is somehow in the same league as Dr. King, as a result of papers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) sanitizing her career. The Davis speech is sponsored by the Kennesaw State African-American Student Alliance.

Phil Kent’s piece, “AJC Omits KSU Speaker’s Communist Background,” was the first indication that the Davis appearance at Kennesaw was not going to take place without some critical comment. He went into some detail about Davis, even noting that she once told an ACLU meeting that she “believes in the violent overthrow of America’s government.”

But that government is now showering her with student and taxpayer dollars through state universities. It is quite a racket.

Julian March of the Wilmington Star-News reports that Davis is going from Kennesaw to speak on January 20 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), also as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. event. The article mentions her communist past but quotes Todd McFadden, a UNCW instructor and director of the Upperman African American Cultural Center, as saying “the controversy associated with Davis’ name has faded” over the years.

He says, “Martin Luther King was controversial in his day but obviously is a much more accepted figure. Things like that change.”

One thing that has changed is that we have a media which censors the truth about people like Davis who rip off the system in order to destroy it.

In addition to pocketing tens of thousands of capitalist dollars from colleges and universities, the Angela Davis group called Critical Resistance, notes writer Tina Trent, gets funding from the super capitalist hedge-fund operator George Soros through his Open Society Foundation.

Critical Resistance aims to empty the prisons of the United States, since criminals are considered victims of a capitalist society.

This campaign is one reason why, according to the AJC, Davis has emerged as a “scholar” on the issue of “imprisonment.”