In this episode of “Inside Judicial Watch,” host Jerry Dunleavy joins JW Senior Investigator Bill Marshall to discuss the perfect storm of events that led to the Parkland school shooting on Valentine’s Day which resulted in the deaths of 17 students and faculty. Had local and federal law enforcement been more proactive, the massacre could have been prevented.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Parkland-shooting-failures_840x480-e1519989300300.jpg366640Judicial Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJudicial Watch2018-03-02 06:15:452018-03-02 06:26:03VIDEO: Law Enforcement’s Failures Before, During and After Parkland School Shooting
According to many gun-control advocates, 18-year-olds are too immature to handle guns — but are mature enough to advise us on gun policy. Thus we’re told we must “listen to the voices” of the young Parkland shooting survivors. Not only that, we’re not to question or oppose them because they’re young, they’re survivors and, by golly, because it’s absolutely devastating to the anti-gun agenda!
There’s something truly reprehensible about this situation, and it’s not conservatives criticizing the positions of activist Parkland students such as David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez. It’s that liberals are using the students as human props and human shields, letting them throw the punches and then condemning the assailed if they dare defend themselves.
Well, sorry, but as I wrote years ago in “The Grieving Activist,” if you want to grieve, grieve. If you want to play politics, play politics.
But my sympathy for grieving ends when the use of grief as a political battering ram begins.
Now, putting minors on the front lines is not at all unprecedented. The youngest U.S. naval captain was 12-year-old David Farragut, and the British would often have upper-class, preteen boy officers aboard their warships, as accurately portrayed in the film Master and Commander. But could you imagine if, after firing some salvos at French vessels and receiving a proportionate response, a British captain bellowed, “What do you think you’re doing?! There are kids aboard this ship!” Ridiculous.
But no more ridiculous than doing likewise in our political campaigns — and, mind you, “campaign” is a military term, applied here because at issue is political warfare. So put kids on the front lines if you wish, as the Nazis did in WWII’s waning days, but know that they’re taking flak because you placed them in harm’s way.
Of course, this all is very calculated. We know that CNN staged a town-hall affair, cherry-picking the attendees and controlling the questions. We know that, as pro-Second Amendment Parkland survivor Brandon Minoff related, the media are ignoring the voices of the pro-gun Parkland kids (so much for “listening to the children”). Nonetheless, while this anti-gun operation may or may not have George Soros’ fingerprints all over it, as Sheriff David Clarke suggested, it’s also no doubt true that the student activists are “wildly motivated,” as CNN’s Alisyn Camerota put it in response to him.
Yet there’s an obvious question here: Is it wise to have recently traumatized people advising on policy? Would we let someone whose dog was just killed by a neighbor help determine punishment for cruelty to animals? “Passion governs, and she never governs wisely,” as Ben Franklin warned.
Additionally, we’re a pretty immature civilization if we look to kids for policy advice. There’s a reason why societies might traditionally have been governed by a council of (hopefully) wise elders: Teen boys may sometimes have utility in warfare, but adolescent angst doesn’t make for sober heads. Moreover, mainstream media love publishing articles about the impulsive “teen brain”; now they say we should bow before these brains’ latest impulses. (Note: I instinctively knew the “teen brain” thesis was nonsense, as this article explains, but immaturity is nonetheless a factor.)
Yet something else must be said about these “wildly motivated” teens. To paraphrase late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, “They really care — about what I have no idea!”
It’s fashionable to beatify survivors. Endure a tragedy, and you’re suddenly a sainted soul whose motives are beyond reproach. But while I’m sure many Parkland students are what we’d call, practically speaking, “good people,” I’m also sure about their character as a group.
They’re just people.
Their number includes the good, the bad and the ugly. Heck, we’re only talking about this issue right now because of a Parkland teen who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSDHS) and who is not at all a good person (I won’t give him publicity by using his name).
Yet the mainstream media exalt Parkland students as fonts of wisdom — while simultaneously infantilizing them, saying they can condemn but not be criticized, offend but not be offended. I’m different: realistic. I’m thus going to exercise some logic here, even though it’s wholly out of fashion.
With approximately 3000 Parkland teen survivors, what’s the probability that they’re all “good people”? Oh, I’m sure a handful will go on to do great things and that most of the others will do good but average things. Then there are the rest. Whom might they include?
Well, without naming names, is it inconceivable that a few of the 3000 might be Machiavellian enough to realize that the shooting’s aftermath is an opportunity for fame and possibly wealth and career-building? This doesn’t mean they don’t have genuine anti-gun passions — they may, as people’s actions are often driven by multiple motivations, some noble and some ignoble — only that the primary impetus may be a more self-serving one.
And, actually, out of 3000 students, it’s inconceivable that there wouldn’t be two or three of this mold. Teens ain’t potted plants — they can be manipulative as well as meritorious. Just ask “clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed about that.
The Left can huff and puff about these observations, but it draws distinctions among gun-crime survivors, too. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was seriously wounded by a left-wing activist in last year’s congressional baseball shooting, and Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, also a Republican, survived the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. But I don’t hear them trumpeted as voices “we must listen to.” Why? It could be what they have in common with the ignored Parkland pro-Second Amendment kids.
The latter, however, are just a few of the young voices about which leftists couldn’t care less. Other examples are the Boy Scouts booed at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, the six-year-old lad in a 2012 anti-Obama video whom liberals wanted dead, and the 650,000 babies they actually do manage to kill annually via prenatal infanticide. And this does reflect the culture-of-death mentality: Liberals want to hear young voices — until they become inconvenient. At that point their freedom of speech can be aborted.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/DavidHogg.jpg_11692092_ver1.0_1280_720-e1519938046819.jpg360640Selwyn Dukehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngSelwyn Duke2018-03-01 16:01:212018-03-01 16:01:21Parkland Kids: The Return of the Grieving Activist
What’s the best way to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States? Most Republicans would say tougher border security. Many have loudly applauded President Donald Trump’s proposal to build an impenetrable “wall” between the United States and Mexico and to hire more border patrol agents to keep unwanted aliens out.
But even the best border barrier isn’t infallible. Some aliens will slip through — or simply overstay a tourist visa. So, it’s critical to have a second layer of defense in the interior of the country.
Conservatives know that. That’s why they want to deputize law enforcement as de facto immigration agents on the nation’s highways and in federal, state and local prisons. Aliens stopped on the road or booked at jails will be fast-tracked for deportation. In fact, it’s already happening — by executive order.
But even these measures — essentially tripwires — are hardly foolproof. If you really want to target illegal aliens, it’s at the point of hiring. Nearly everyone acknowledges – quietly, it seems — that often difficult-to-fill low-skill jobs are the real “magnet” for immigrants to try to enter the country illegally.
But thus far it’s been nearly impossible to institute an effective workplace enforcement system.
Part of the problem — but only part, and probably not the most important part — is technical.
Democrats and some Republicans have long complained that most “workplace verification” systems — like “E-Verify” — are too error-prone to be useful.
And for years, politicians have used that argument to stall or derail bills that included the program.
But the real problem isn’t technical. It’s political. Most American businesses don’t want to be held responsible for weeding out illegal aliens from the workforce. They don’t want to shoulder administrative burden or the additional costs involved. We’re not immigration “cops,” they insist.
In fact, the last time a comprehensive immigration reform package passed the Congress, in 1986, businesses revolted against a proposed provision–– known as “employer sanctions” — that would have punished them for employing illegal workers.
Their revolt was so strong that Congress was forced to water down the employer sanctions provision to the point where it no longer served as an effective deterrent to illegal hiring.
Businesses were allowed to claim an “affirmative defense” against illegal hiring by claiming that they had made a “reasonable effort” to verify the legal status of their workers by inspecting their hiring documents. As long as those documents seemed “genuine on their face,” employers could not be accused of “knowingly” hiring illegal workers.
As a result, illegal aliens began forging their hiring documents en masse. And not surprisingly, it was soon found that “employer sanctions” system weren’t working. In fact, fabricating green cards and driver’s licenses and stealing social security numbers became a burgeoning new industry.
Believe it or not, this toothless system of workplace enforcement — which has deluded taxpayers into thinking that their government was actually protecting their jobs as well as their borders — has remained in place at the federal level for the past thirty-plus years.
What little progress that’s been made is due largely to conservatives pushing for E-Verify at the state level. Currently, some 20 states have mandated the use of E-Verify in the private or public sector, or in some cases, both. Nationally, about 57 percent of all jobs are screened with E-Verify, up from just 30 percent in 2010. But with only piecemeal and partial local enforcement, illegal aliens are free to apply for work in the thirty states that don’t use E-Verify.
President Trump, to his credit, has decided that America, at last, must end the current “nod-and-a-wink” conspiracy between illegal immigrants and low-skill businesses by insisting that E-Verify be implemented nationwide.
But Trump hasn’t exactly touted E-Verify, either. A border wall is a far more visually compelling symbol and metaphor for American policy intent. It also implicates America’s southern neighbor more directly. Mexico has no reason to pay for interior enforcement, but insisting that Mexico fund a wall along a border the two countries share makes perfect sense. It also stokes the kind of patriotic fervor that keeps Trump popular with the GOP base.
Downplaying E-Verify also allows Trump to dodge a potential fight with the US business community over immigration enforcement. Remember: Trump needs the business community’s support on tax reform, infrastructure rebuilding and a host of other economic issues.
Antagonizing business groups on an issue they are leery of could backfire. Immigrants are heavily concentrated in “Blue” states like California, New York and New Jersey. Democrats in these states would love to exploit business resistance to workplace verification to win support for their political candidates and to undermine Trump’s immigration policies generally.
Some Democrats have support an expanded E-Verify system in the past, but only in the context of a sweeping amnesty program. Without a commitment from Trump to expand legalizations beyond the so-called DREAMers, they’re unlikely to support E-Verify.
Trump should agree to make that commitment – one still short of a full-scale amnesty, mind you — if it ensures that tougher workplace enforcement as well as border enforcement receives bipartisan support.
No doubt some powerful conservatives will howl. And business concerns will need to be allayed.
But getting E-Verify passed is simply too important not to make additional concessions.
Illegal immigration is at its lowest level since 2003, but those flows will resume – and surge – as the economy keeps expanding. We need a deal now. Otherwise, we will be arguing over this same issue – without resolution – for another thirty years.
Stewart Lawrence is a consultant and policy analyst.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/E-Verify_Participation_Poster.jpg359640The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2018-02-28 10:33:312018-02-28 10:33:31Border Security Is Important For Immigration But Workplace Enforcement Is YUGE
Two occasional papers were recently published by the Center for Security Policy. The first, entitled “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?,” was published in late 2016. The second, “The Perfect Storm,” was published in 2017. Both papers describe a 35-year lease to a cargo container terminal on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The peculiar discoveries in the papers made by investigative journalists Mary Fanning and Alan Jones have not received the national media attention they warrant.
In 2014, the United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based company Gulftainer was awarded a three-and-a-half decade lease to operate the cargo container terminal at Port Canaveral, Florida. The peculiarity of this acquisition rests on the fact that Gulftainer is co-owned by the emir of Sharjah, UAE, and Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, who is the brother of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear mastermind. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Dr. Jafar was an official of the Iraqi regime who could have been engaged as a military target.
Why is this alarming? In part, it is because Dr. Jafar has also been credited with the design of a miniaturized nuclear weapon, commonly known as the “Beach Ball.” North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has appeared standing by a similarly purported nuclear weapon in recent photographs. This type of nuclear weapon can easily fit inside the nosecone of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and can cause the kind of catastrophic damage the United States has never seen.
The danger to America is not just that Gulftainer is co-owned the family of Saddam Hussein’s top nuclear mastermind, Dr. Jafar, and the emir of Sharjah, but also that Gulftainer is also in a joint venture with Kontsern-Morinformsistem-Agat, the Russian company that makes the Club-K missile launch system. The Club-K system looks identical to standard ocean containers that are shipped by the billions all over the world. The alarming difference between the ordinary cargo containers is evident by what’s found on the inside of the Club-K containers. Four cruise missiles are housed in each Club-K system and can be launched directly from the container – even remotely.
How many Trojan horses have our enemies shipped around the world? Such an entry into any of our ports would be considered astronomically valuable to any enemy of the United States. Have some of these dangerous containers made their way to America? These are viable questions.
Though speculative, the numbers could be staggering. Some ships hold as many as 3,000 cargo containers. “Relying on intelligence and risk analysis,” Van Hipp tell us in his book, The New Terrorism, “we are only able to scan less than one percent of the incoming containers before they enter the country.” Do the math, and that’s 30 or fewer containers scanned per 3,000. The potential for a national security threat to be offloaded at Port Canaveral or any other port around the country is alarming. These 40-foot shipping containers could be carried by semi trucks or freight trains anywhere around the country without raising a single eyebrow.
If a Club-K missile attack were to happen, the results could be cataclysmic. Each hidden missile could carry any number of conventional payloads, including those poised for a biological, chemical, electromagnetic pulse (EMP), or nuclear attack.
Clare Lopez, vice president for research and analysis at the Center for Security Policy, says, “We have no idea how many of those might be already among container traffic in the world.” This is rightly disturbing for us, as millions of Americans have unknowingly put their trust in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) review and oversight process, or probably have never given it any thought regarding safety.
Ordinarily, the CFIUS would determine whether or not any kind of foreign purchase, acquisition, or lease like this one could have some kind of national security implication. A failure of the review and oversight process is not out of the question, considering the utter failure of the Uranium One case, which occurred in the same time period. Lopez confirms, “It speaks to a lack of oversight during the Obama years, particularly of the CFIUS body that has the responsibility for oversight over deals just like this. Either they didn’t pay enough attention to it or they just let it go just like the Uranium One deal, but of course, there we know there was all kinds of malfeasance involved, including corruption, extortion, blackmail, kickbacks, and payments to the Clinton Foundation.”
According to Lopez, “Gulftainer is seeking similar cargo container terminal leases at least 42 other U.S. ports.” Roadways and railways extending from Port Canaveral could be giving our enemies access to the entire country.
Media and layperson alike should be compelled to bring this to the attention of those in Congress, particularly to those who are members of the House Transportation Committee. Could we be on the brink of disaster without even knowing it?
ABOUT J.M. PHELPS
J.M. Phelps is a Christian activist and journalist based in the Southeastern U.S.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/container-ship-in-port-e1519824413663.jpg398640Center For Security Policyhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCenter For Security Policy2018-02-28 08:27:302018-02-28 08:27:30We could have shipping containers full of foreign nukes in our ports and not know it
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham reported Monday that Broward Country deputies were told not to go into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the mass shooting earlier this month.
The alleged reason? They didn’t have any body cameras with them.
WATCH:
“Curiously, police also lost radio communications during the parkland shooting. And our source claims that radio communication also went dead during the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting in 2017 that he also got a lot of criticism for.”
Ingraham did not say who issued the order to not go into the school.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/ISRAEL-CLINTON-e1519740381531.jpg371640The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2018-02-27 09:06:432018-02-27 09:08:19VIDEO: Broward County Deputies Were TOLD Not To Go Into High School
In the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting and the wave of well-organized and financed protests using emotionally traumatized students, the Florida Legislature is set to vote on a range of legal responses — including a series of gun restrictions.
This, from a state that has some of the strongest Second Amendment protections in the union, should cause some real alarm. The pressure on legislators up for re-election in November is immense, from the demonstrators, anti-gun activists, their media allies, and the public consuming it all. But it is totally and purposely misdirected.
The real blame in this atrocity — after the deranged shooter himself, never forget that — is the total collapse of the governmental institutions charged with protecting the defenseless students collected into an unprotected public school.
Let’s recap how the Parkland shooting has played out politically. Because make no mistake, it is now allpolitical in Florida and nationally, and it is driven by the activist left and the media pursuing their anti-gun agendas — and not by the facts as they are being revealed.
The FBI failed twice to take any steps when informed about the Parkland shooter being a threat to do exactly this, by his own family members. This is hardly the worst, as the FBI gets a lot of bum tips, but it is still a failure.
Worse, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office failed to take any steps when called to his home 39 times, including for violent and threatening behavior, and being told he had guns. That is an extraordinary number of red flags missed or blown off by local law enforcement. The FBI and the Sheriff not only did nothing, but apparently they did not communicate with each other with this information.
Worse yet, the sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school did nothing, standing outside with his gun while the killer roamed the halls killing defenseless people.
And then very worst of all, when three more Broward deputies showed up, all of them stayed outside while the monster continued killing inside. They did nothing until Coral Springs police arrived on the scene, at which point the killer had stopped and was slipping away.
With four deputies all doing this, it is clear it was not cowardice. There are just too many good cops for that to be the case. They were almost assuredly following some sort of policy by the uber-incompetent and morally dubious Broward County Sheriff, a Democrat with a history of corruption charges.
The collapse of law enforcement and school security in the Parkland shooting (such as cameras being on a 20-minute delay, not a live feed, sowing more confusion) is perhaps the worst in modern American history. This shooting was eminently preventable, and should never have happened. The systemic collapse on the part of multiple government organizations failed the students, their families, friends and community.
And it will again.
But the entire media and political focus is on the weapon the killer used. It’s not the killer, not the FBI, not the deputies, not the school. It’s the weapon.
None of these protests are about the utter failure of the law enforcement community in Broward County. That’s because there is an agenda, using impressionable, traumatized youth. What there is not with any of these well-orchestrated protests is any effort to look at cause-and-effect solutions in this shooting. They are staring us in the face, but being ignored for the ongoing anti-gun political agenda.
And finally, the pursuit of gun bans and even gun confiscation, as has been suggested repeatedly in the wake of Parkland — using dubious example of Australia as the success of gun confiscation — means Americans would have to simply trust their defense to the same law enforcement and government systems that failed Parkland students so badly. Even in the best of times, police or deputies are several minutes away from a murderous rampage — or a home invasion. In the worst times, apparently they wait until the murder spree has ended.
Compare and contrast Parkland to the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting last year where a civilian heard the attack, got his semi-automatic rifle and took down the mass killer at the church before cops could get to the scene. What was the gun he used to stop the slaughter? An AR-15, the exact type of weapon that is being aimed at for banning by activists and Democrats.
As the protests and politics continues to play out, remember where the real blame lies — after the evil shooter — when you hear all the calls for gun regulations. And ask how you will defend yourself once all our non-musket guns are confiscated. Because that is the only end-game for the anti-gun activists, protestations to the side.
In his first year as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has already transformed the agency in many ways. He spoke exclusively to The Daily Signal before addressing attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual Reagan Dinner. An edited transcript of the interview is below.
Rob Bluey: You gave a speech at CPAC last year where you were just at the beginning of your tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency, and you outlined some of the things that you wanted to do. Here we are a year later, you’ve repealed, taken back, 22 regulations at a savings at $1 billion, a significant contribution to the U.S. economy, as President Donald Trump talked about in his speech. What does that mean?
Scott Pruitt: Busy year. And it was great to be at CPAC about two weeks after having been sworn in last year. And I talked last year about the future ain’t what it used to be, that Yogi Berra quote that I cited about the change that was gonna take place at the agency and I think we’ve been about that change the last year. Focusing on rule of law, restoring process and order, making sure that we engage in cooperative federalism as we engage in regulation.
But the key to me is that weaponization of the agency that took place in the Obama administration, where the agency was used to pick winners and losers. Those days are over.
You know, to be in Pennsylvania as I was early in my term, shortly after the CPAC speech last year, and to spend time with miners in Pennsylvania and be able to share with them underground. I was a thousand feet underground and 3 miles in. First time that an administrator in history had done that, and I talked to those long wall miners in Pennsylvania, and delivered the message from the president that the war on coal is over. That was a tremendous message for them, emotion that I saw on their faces.
Can you imagine, in the first instance, an agency of the federal government, a department of the U.S. government, declaring war on a sector of your economy? Where is that in the statute? Where does that authority exist? It doesn’t. And so to restore process and restore commitment to doing things the right way, I think we’ve seen tremendous success this past year.
Bluey: President Trump cited a number of examples that have come out of EPA in his speech to the CPAC attendees, and one of them was coal, another one was the Paris climate treaty. Talk about those two issues and your work with the president in terms of why you decided to take those actions in conjunction with him?
Pruitt: The president’s decision to exit the Paris accord—tremendously courageous. When you look at that decision, it put America first, which is what the president said in the Rose Garden in June.
What was decided in Paris under the past administration was not about carbon reduction. It was about penalties to our own economy because China and India, under that accord, didn’t have to take any steps to reduce CO2 until the year 2030. So, if it’s really about CO2 reduction, why do you let that happen?
“That weaponization of the agency that took place in the Obama administration—where the agency was used to pick winners and losers—those days are over.”
When you look at who’s led the world in CO2 reduction, it’s us. From the year 2000 to 2014, we reduced our CO2 footprint almost 20 percent through innovation and technology. So, we have nothing to be apologetic about as a country, and yet, the past administration went to Paris, hat in hand, and said, “Penalize our economy”, which is what happened with the Clean Power Plan.
The president saying no to that and putting America first was the tremendously courageous and right thing to do. I’m very excited about that decision. I know he talked about that in his speech and it was a wonderful decision he made, and I think great for the American people.
Overall, this regulatory reform agenda—this regulatory certainty that we’re about—is achieving good things for the environment, but it’s also achieving, as you say, good things for our economy. We can do both. And I think that’s what’s key.
President Donald Trump listens to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt after announcing his decision that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/Newscom)
Bluey: President Trump certainly cited deregulation as just as significant, I believe he said, as the tax cuts. We’ve seen some of the benefits for many American businesses, and certainly American workers as a result of that.
Pruitt: When you think about an EPA—armed, weaponized, if you will—like a rule like WOTUS, the Waters of the United States rule, that would take a puddle and turn into a lake. To take land use decisions away from farmers and ranchers and landowners across this country, and people think it was just farming and ranching. It was the building of subdivisions. It was really all land use decisions.
I was in Utah last year meeting with some folks there that were building a subdivision, and there was an Army Corps of Engineers representative that was standing outside the subdivision with me, and he pointed to an ephemeral drainage ditch and he said, “Scott, that’s a water of the United States.” And I said, “Well, it’s not gonna be anymore.”
That’s exactly the kind of attitude that drove the past administration. It was all about power. It wasn’t about outcomes necessarily. It was about power and picking winners and losers, and we’re getting that corrected.
Bluey: That’s one thing I want to talk to you about because right now your agency is going across the country. You’re having hearings on the Clean Power Plan. You’re trying to get input from Americans, and not just Americans in Washington, D.C., and the Beltway, but places like Wyoming and Missouri and West Virginia. Why is that important to get out and hear from Americans about how government affects their lives?
Pruitt: Couple things: One, we’ve been to 30-plus states. And as we’ve met with stakeholders, farmers and ranchers, and those in the utility sector and the energy sector, landowners, representatives from the state’s governors, and DEQs from across the country, I think what we didn’t recognize over the last several years with the past administration is that those folks are partners. They care about outcomes.
“We shouldn’t start from the premise that those folks are adversaries or don’t care about clean air or clean water. We should start from the premise that they do, and work with them to achieve good outcomes.”
Think about those farmers and those ranchers. They’re our first conservationists. They’re our first environmentalists. I think of the young man, David, in Florida that I meant about a month ago, 12 years old. I was speaking to a group of individuals in Florida. David was there with his dad and his granddad was there. Now, think about what their greatest asset is? Their land. And they’re teaching David how to cultivate and harvest and care for that land and act as a steward.
That’s the message we’re sending across the country. We shouldn’t start from the premise that those folks are adversaries or don’t care about clean air or clean water. We should start from the premise that they do, and work with them to achieve good outcomes. That’s the difference in how we approach it versus the past administration.
Bluey: That leads to my next question. When we last spoke in October, we talked about what true environmentalism really means, and I’d like you to share again how you’re approaching that.
Pruitt: It’s a very important question because I think when you look at what is true environmentalism, the past administration said prohibition.
Though we have natural gas and oil and coal and all these natural resources that we’re blessed with as a country, they approached it by saying, “Put up fences. Do not touch.” And that’s just simply wrong-headed in my view.
What we should be about is stewardship. Recognizing that God has blessed us with those resources, that we have an obligation to use them responsibly and environmentally stewardship focused with respect to future generations, and we can do that.
This notion that we cannot be about jobs and stewardship of the environment is just simply not right. We’ve always done that well as a country. We haven’t had to choose. The past administration had to choose. Jobs or environmental protection? We’re saying environmental stewardship and jobs in the economy. We can do both together.
Bluey: One of the things I know you’ve been focused on is making the EPA, as an agency, run more efficiently. And you talked to me before about how you brought in a staff that is really committed to doing that. How has that progressed?
Pruitt: It’s exciting. Exciting. I mean permitting is one of those areas that I think is a great representation of that, a great measurement better put.
When you have a permitting processes that take 10, 12, 15 years, that’s not permitting. That’s obstruction. That isn’t an answer. That’s just simply a delay tactic in my view.
We are going through a process right now that, by the end of this year, every decision we make on a permit at the agency will be done within six months, up or down. Now, states do it all the time. States have processes in place where they’re making decisions between six months and a year, and we don’t.
“When you have a permitting processes that take 10, 12, 15 years, that’s not permitting. That’s obstruction.”
We’re getting accountability across the country in regions and in headquarters, and it’s gonna be done by the end of the year.
That’s something that is very exciting to me, but when you think about the core mission of our agency, we’ve done something else that’s very important. We’re setting goals.
We’re saying, “Where do we wanna be air attainment?” Those air quality standards that we have, where do we need to be five years from now? What about Superfund sites? What about water infrastructure? How do we avoid a Flint, Michigan, and a Gold King, Colorado? How do we take the backlog of chemicals? How do we address the state of limitation plans that states have submitted to improve air quality, and work through that backlog?
Let’s set objective measurements and measure them every single day, and challenge everyone to meet those goals. And it’s exciting. And people are really, I think, getting vested and invested in it.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt watches an underground conveyor belt system carrying coal to the surface during a tour of the Harvey Mine in Sycamore, Pennsylvania. Pruitt was visiting the area as part of his Back-to-Basics Agenda promoting coal as a source of energy. (Photo: Eric Vance/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
Bluey: Last fall, you took action on sue and settle. You decided to end that practice. What has that meant in the months since you’ve taken that action?
Pruitt: Well, Rob, you get this, but how damaging was that to rulemaking when the sue and settle practice—a third-party group comes in and sues the agency, goes into a courtroom somewhere in the country, agrees to a substantive rule in the course of that settlement, puts it into consent decree, and then goes all over the country and says, “This is what you have to do across the country.”
Now, that’s abusive. That’s not how the process should work. You should not have a sue and settle process to bypass rulemaking. So, I ended it.
I sent a memo out to the entire agency that said gone are the days of us going into a backroom at a courtroom, and make a decision with one party that affects the entire country.
We’re going to do rulemaking the right way. We’re going to publish our rules. We’re going to take comment on those rules. We’re going to respond to those comments. We’re going to finalize the rules. That’s what Congress has required of us. That’s what we’re going to do. It’s going to make a substantial difference.
“This notion that we cannot be about jobs and stewardship of the environment is just simply not right. … We can do both together.”
One other area that we’ve addressed that I think is equally important is this area of our advisory committees. These scientists that serve on advisory committees that help us do rulemaking because, as you know, when we make a decision, we don’t just snap our finger. We have to build a record. There’s scientific inquiry. There’s evaluation, data, methodology. All of those things take place with water, air, whatever the rulemaking is.
As that record is built, you have advisory committees, you have scientists that advise me as the administrator and the agency as a whole on the efficacy, the merits of that rule. Well, those scientists, we have many scientists that serve on those advisory committees that were also getting grants from the agency that were supposed to be given as independent counsel. In fact, we had several scientists receive almost $77 million over the last three years.
I said to those individuals, “Look, you can receive the grant, but you can’t serve on the advisory committee. Or you can serve on the advisory committee but not receive the grant. Choose this day what you’re going to do.”
We got accountability there to ensure the independence of the scientific basis by which we were doing rulemaking. That’s the process changes we’re engaged in that I think lead to good results at the end, and it’s what the American people deserve.
Bluey: Follow up to that last point you made. I know that when you announced that change, obviously there was a big uproar in the media and among those people who didn’t like the fact that you were trying to make this change. What have the results been in the months that followed?
Pruitt: Common sense is not too common, and so, I think when we make those kind of commonsense changes it’s disruptive to the status quo, but frankly, the status quo needs to be disrupted in these areas.
“Common sense is not too common, and so, I think when we make those kind of commonsense changes it’s disruptive to the status quo, but frankly, the status quo needs to be disrupted in these areas.”
We’re getting good accountability, good transparent outcomes. The other thing that’s just amazing to me is that the agency historically, as it’s done rulemaking, it contracts studies to third parties. It doesn’t do the science itself in some instances, it goes to a third party and says, “You do the science for us, give us the findings.” But then when the findings come back to the agency, they don’t provide the methodology, nor do they provide the data. And so there’s no transparency in that process. We’re going to get accountability there as well.
These matters, at the end of the day, I think are what we should be focused upon. As we do our work, do it with a commitment to transparency and objectivity, making sure that we have a record that is solid, and in making informed decisions about the rules that we’re passing so that the American people have a voice, and that we know how it’s going to impact positively the environment, but also the cost-benefit aspect.
Bluey: Speaking at the Reagan Dinner at CPAC is a real honor. There have been many who’ve come before you and had this opportunity to address the audience. What message do you want to leave the CPAC attendees this year?
Pruitt: This first year as I’ve served, and as the president has served this country, he’s a person of results.
You think about the State of the Union. His message that night was powerful. I think it was very powerful. But it was powerful because he said look what we’ve accomplished this past year. Look what we promised, look what we’ve done, look at the impact it’s having on the economy. And look what’s going to happen as we go into 2018.
I love how the president leads with a commitment to getting results. And I think the American people, as I serve in this capacity, we’ve got to focus on what. Key objectives that we want to achieve for the environment. Air, land, water, removing solid waste and hazardous wastes.
“Look what we promised, look what we’ve done, look at the impact it’s having on the economy.”
What are our objectives? Let’s focus on those to address all those very good things for the environment. But let’s also recognize that we have to have an attitude that says we can be about natural resource management and environmental stewardship, that we don’t have to choose. That’s one of the greatest challenges we have as a country. We need to get that question right and that answer right because we have so much opportunity.
It’s an exciting time to be serving. There’s wonderful things happening. And this country, I’m telling you, the growth that we’re seeing, it’s only the beginning. As we get together next year, which I pray we do, we’re going to celebrate another year of progress.
You talk about those 22 actions of $1 billion [at the EPA], $8 billion as a total for the administration. That’s really quite amazing. We’re going to see that continue through courageous leadership, and focus on getting results.
Rob Bluey is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. Send an email to Rob. Twitter: @RobertBluey.
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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is prior to addressing CPAC attendees, Scott Pruitt speaking exclusively to The Daily Signal about his first year as EPA administrator. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/Newscom)
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/180224_ScottPruitt-1250x650-e1519645332623.jpg363640The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2018-02-26 06:42:362018-02-26 20:20:08VIDEO: The Weaponization of the EPA Is Over: An Exclusive Interview With Scott Pruitt
After delivering a homily indicting Catholic Senators (Democrat and Republican) who voted against legislation that would render illegal the killing of unborn babies with a developed nervous system, I received a response in a letter:
I look forward to hearing your next political homily, similar to the one on abortion a few weeks ago. Please state the Catholic position on mass murder, and, in that context, list the Catholic Republicans in Congress who block any reasonable assault-weapons ban. You might need to extend church hours since the list will, undoubtedly, be extensive. Thank you.
It needs to be said right off, of course, that a homily on the evil of abortion is about as political as a homily condemning the Holocaust. Regardless, if my correspondent would identify any politician who was in favor of placing weapons – including daggers and box cutters – into the hands of criminals and psychotics for purposes of mass murder, I would happily identify them by name. And I would invite the same boos and hisses I invite for any politician who doesn’t lift a finger to protect the lives of unborn babies.
But on such matters, here is my answer in a nutshell:
Abortion is intrinsically evil and thus opposing it is not political.
Guns are not intrinsically evil. On the contrary, the Catechism teaches not just the right but the duty to use lethal force, if necessary, to defend oneself and those towards whom we have a responsibility. The same right to life that condemns mass murder requires the use of a gun to wound or kill if necessary to save life. Keeping guns away from mass murderers is obviously a moral duty, but guns in themselves are not intrinsically evil, unlike abortion.
Every firearm can be used in an assault, so the label “assault rifle” is a political, rather than a moral, one.
Priests and prelates have no pertinent expertise in crafting gun control legislation or, or for that matter, in preventing the arming of rogue states. Those killed by a butter knife, an AK-47, or a neutron bomb are equally and indifferently dead. In each case, the resort to arms will be judged just or unjust by the same moral criterion.
The Church must always uphold the integrity of justice, and justice not only permits but requires defense of the innocent against unjust aggressors, i.e., those who inflict harm without due cause.
But is a “reasonable assault-weapons ban” a moral imperative in our day in view of the increasingly frequent school shootings (not to mention violence in the cities)?
Here there arise some truly political questions that need thoughtful consideration and rigorous analysis – by the laity. The ones I am about to list certainly are not exhaustive. (I do not presume to exercise priestly authority here, but I am, after all, a citizen, too.)
What is a “weapon”? Obviously, handguns and rifles are weapons. But so are box cutters on airplanes. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered with assaults that began with box cutters in the hands of terrorists.
Image: The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre, printed in 1770 by Paul Revere after a design by Henry Pelham [Library of Congress]
The difficulty of defining a “weapon,” however, doesn’t disappear when restricting the conversation to fire sticks. What is an “assault weapon”? A tank? A machine gun? A repeating Winchester rifle? An M-16? The real question is how might legislation keep these weapons out of the hands of criminals and the mentally disturbed?
The question of crafting criminal laws threatening to inflict just punishment, it seems to me, is far easier to evaluate with moral criterion than regulatory laws. Front-end regulatory laws such as a “reasonable assault weapons ban,” in contrast, are far more complicated because not only do the laws need to envision an ever-expanding universe of definitions, there are serious questions of effectiveness and the morality of infringing on the right to self-defense. And it should be recognized that in the aftermath of violence, hysteria and emotionalism easily disrupt clear thinking.
With respect to the question of effectiveness: What kind of gun control is “reasonable”? How do outlaws obtain guns? Is it true – or just a clever phrase – that if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns? What is the experience in cities with strict “gun control” laws? What is the experience of political entities with “conceal and carry” regulations? What are the facts?
All of these questions are clearly beyond the competence of the clergy.
Questions of gun violence causality need a continuing dispassionate investigation by the laity and the experts among them. (My educated guess is that pornography plays a large part in causality. When the porn fails to satisfy, a twisted mind seeks other methods of excitement. And of course at root is the breakdown of the family including legalized abortion. Disrespect of unborn human life begets disrespect of all human life.)
Who among us would not like to see a world without violence, where guns were only used for hunting and sport? But the effects of Original Sin remain and we have a natural right to self-defense. (Alas, whenever I try to “Visualize World Peace,” I end up visualizing a police state.)
These are difficult times, with a broken culture contributing to a breakdown on a wide scale of our civilization, leading to countless acts of violence. So pronouncing on the morality of banning guns should not be made by a cleric in the exercise of his prophetic office. There are too many moving parts, questions of fact and causality, and good faith prudential judgments where believing Catholics can disagree in good conscience. But underlying moral principles remain and need proper application.
At times, a clean gun in good working order can be the solution – as in just war, just police action, and acts of personal self-defense. But legislation regulating the procurement and possession of guns, to preserve the liberty and order and security essential to a free society, is the business of the laity.
Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky
Father Jerry J. Pokorsky is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington. He is pastor of St. Catherine of Siena parish in Great Falls, Virginia.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/MORLITY.jpg360640The Catholic Thinghttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Catholic Thing2018-02-24 06:39:212018-02-24 06:41:26On the Morality of Gun Control
President Trump ran on an America first platform. His mantra was MAGA – Make America Great Again. President Trump in his inaugural address said:
Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.
When President Trump attends a rally, speaks at a press conference or Tweets, he is talking directly to America’s “bourgeois class.” Bourgeois is defined as “amemberofthemiddleclass.”
That [bourgeois] culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow:
Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
Supporters of Barack Obama at a rally.
Politicians have wooed the bourgeois class as did former President Barack Obama. Once elected, however, the bourgeois class have been either ignored or suffered under various administrations.
The American middle [bourgeois] class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.
While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.
After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.
The bourgeois class is President Trump’s base and the bedrock of people who will make America great again.
What are the challenges to making America bourgeois again?
Wax and Alexander pointed out in their article:
Did everyone abide by those [bourgeois culture] precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.
Today there are many “deviants” who openly disavow and disparage the most basic bourgeois cultural norms.
Who are the bourgeois culture deviants? Who are the hypocrites? Who are the transgressors? Here is a short list:
Those who labled the $1,000 bonuses given to workers as “crumbs.”
Hollywood which no longer makes films about the bourgeois class.
Those who do not serve their country and are openly unpatriotic.
Those who would rather be idle rather than work
Those politicians who subsidize idleness and sloth.
Those who create sanctuaries for those who abuse drugs and other addictive substances.
Those who on radio, television, in music and during the day use course language.
Those who are not respectful of the duly elected President of these United States.
Wax and Alexander noted:
[T]hose adults with influence over the [bourgeois] culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.
Making America Bourgeois Again!
President Trump and his administration have made it their sole mission to restore America’s bourgeois class. Washington, D.C. does not want to empower the bourgeois class because as President Trump pointed out during his inaugural address,
Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.
Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.
The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.
Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
Today there is much to celebrate, especially for the bourgeois class. Make America Bourgeois Again!
RELATED VIDEO: Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) staying tax cuts are unpatriotic.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/middle-class.jpg410620Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2018-02-22 05:37:132018-02-22 07:33:25President Donald J. Trump’s Plan to ‘Make America Bourgeois Again’
America has been successful at keeping God out of schools, but not guns. And that irony isn’t lost on leaders in Arkansas, who are desperately trying to put positive influences back into classrooms. If there was ever a time to put a simple reminder like “In God We Trust” before students, it’s now. While Florida families mourn the loss of 17 young lives, maybe it’s time to rethink what messages we’re teaching our teenagers.
In Arkansas, the idea was simple: require schools to put up “In God We Trust” posters. The bill sailed through the state legislature, passing 78-1 in the House and 28-2 in the Senate. Rep. Jim Dotson (R) thought it wouldn’t just be an opportunity to honor America’s heritage, but also “provide students with a good conscience while in school.” “We all know of instances in recent events where our culture of violence is being shown all around, and I think it’s something that hopefully students will be able to see on the walls and know that our country was founded on something better.”
As a show of support, local American Legion posts have raised money to pay for 1,000 framed posters in one school district, and others are lining up to donate more. As usual, the American Atheists are pitching a fit that children might be exposed to the word “God,” something they could certainly stand to hear more of, if the latest headlines are any indication. “Rep. Dotson and groups who have pledged to donate these displays have been quite clear about their purpose: injecting religion into Arkansas’s public schools.” Well, I hate to break it to them, but God’s already there. Unless these kids check their purses and wallets at the front door, He’s on every dollar they have.
As for putting the motto out where everyone can see it, the Supreme Court has said time and time again that there’s absolutely nothing wrong about it. The motto isn’t an endorsement of religion, the court said, but a “statement of optimism” about America’s heritage. If you want to protect kids from something, try the schools’ graphic sex-ed curriculums or propaganda of those trying to deconstruct society and the family that’s paraded through our schools. Those are the real destructive influences.
At a time when more schools are war zones than classrooms, surely we can all see the good of pointing kids to the fact that there is a God to whom we will all give an account — including the atheists who work night and day to fight someone they say doesn’t exist. For everyone else, maybe we should ponder the possibility that by letting God back in we might keep the violence out.
Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/022118_ingodwetrust_700x400-e1519257188309.png366640Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2018-02-21 18:53:522018-02-21 18:53:52In God Schools Trust
Everyday in Florida, the sun does not shine on the multitudes involuntarily confined via the innocuous-sounding “Baker Act” … the multitudes of harmless elders, in particular. What can cause the sudden detention of an elderly man, 89 years old, inside a metropolitan Florida hospital mental ward?
In the case of my Father, Al Katz was determined to be a threat to others because he pushed his walker against someone, known as “walker abuse,” not normally lethal or catastrophic. Although Al Katz, a Holocaust Survivor of seven years of slave labor in temperatures reaching 52 degrees below zero, had never harmed another human being or himself, the Manatee County judge sentenced my Dad to three weeks of involuntary commitment with a no-contact order placed upon him. Al Katz was prohibited thereby from receiving from or sending to his family any communications of any kind.
Al Katz’s involuntary confinement in the gruesome underground psychiatric ward in Manatee Memorial Hospital would have lasted by law 72 hours, but instead, Al Katz was detained without further court hearings for three weeks, isolated from his family waiting to see him just on the other side of the electronic metal doors guarded by armed officers. Al Katz was re-living the Holocaust, surrounded by men in uniforms with guns and unable to communicate with the ones he loved.
The threshold for Baker Act commitments of elders in Florida is extremely low. For the most minimal of reasons, elders are imprisoned in hospitals and psychiatric facilities for days, reaping enormous funds for these providers of makeshift jail cells, where grandmas and grandpas barely able to walk are kept off the streets as threats to society.
Al Katz could barely walk, could not drive, had no weapons of any kind, and had lived 89 years as an admirable asset to his community, but the court found that he posed a threat to himself or others, purportedly necessitating the Baker Act. On the other hand, Florida’s infamous school mass murder suspect, who shall remain unnamed herein, posed low risk of harming himself or others, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families, which had visited the suspect and his family following his Internet postings of self-mutilation and express keen interest in buying a gun. DCF records state that the suspect “plans to go out and buy a gun. It is unknown what he is buying the gun for.”
What else did DCF and multiple other agencies know about the suspect or should have known? He was on medications for A.D.H.D., seeing counselors, and a client at a number of mental health facilities. He was referred for a “threat assessment” due to his long history of fights with teachers and frequent profanity directed against school staff. He posted on the Internet photos of dead and mutilated animals that he had killed; had a Nazi symbol on his book bag; was prohibited from carrying a backpack at school; harassed his neighbors; was investigated or visited by law enforcement nearly 40 times in eight years; attended numerous schools, including a school for students with emotional problems and an alternative high school for at-risk youths; was regularly disciplined for disobedience; made a false 911 call; posted “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” on the Internet using his real name; was uncomfortable with his Hispanic heritage; was suspended multiple times in the 2016-17 school year; shared photos of small animals he had shot; bragged about his intent to bring guns to school; was found with bullets in his backpack; kicked out a glass window at his middle school; had frequent prolonged, unexplained absences from school; had made numerous Internet postings of guns, knives, and other ominous images; and had been referred to a mental health center to be detained under the Baker Act, which center determined that the suspect was not a threat after visiting him at his home and giving him a safety contract to sign.
Al Katz never had a mental health counselor visit him at his home, never was given a safety contract to sign, and was illegally held in the Baker Act for many weeks without the mandatory court hearings. Al Katz never had any warning signs that he would pose a threat to society; the suspect had every warning sign that he would “be a professional school shooter,” including his own word on it signed with his own uniquely-spelled name.
Could dozens of murders have been prevented in Florida? Yes. How are mass detentions of elders in sunless cages lowering the societal threat? How many detained grandmas and grandpas would ever commit a mass murder?
This past summer, I once again alerted the Florida and Indiana authorities about another young man with a violent history who has made foreboding Internet postings for years, including videos of simulated decapitations with blood spurting out of the necks, photographs of assault weapons, and his own ominous poetry reminiscent of past mass murderers, but the evidence and I are invariably ignored. The clock is ticking with his rage, but no one will listen. Previously, this convicted serial predator mutilated the genital area of one of his victim’s dolls and set it on fire to “release his anger.”
Again, the clock is ticking with his rage, but no one will listen … just like the Florida school shooting case, with flagrant warning signs unheeded. Said the shooting suspect’s public defender:
This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be a school shooter. If this isn’t a person who should have gotten someone’s attention, I don’t know who is. This was a multi-system failure…
When harmless elders are locked up, this too is a multi-system failure that any decent society cannot condone any more than a mass murderer walking its streets or a serial predator lurking.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/baker-act-e1519208232840.jpg366640Beverly Newmanhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngBeverly Newman2018-02-21 05:17:492018-02-21 05:17:49Florida’s Multi-System Failures and the broken ‘Baker Act’
The President’s Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, recently raised some eyebrows when he postulated that many illegal aliens who could have applied to participate in the Obama administration’s illegal DACA program may have simply been too lazy to apply for temporary lawful status when the program was in effect.
Although General Kelly had a highly successful and laudable record of service to our nation in the United States Marine Corps, he never enforced nor administered our nation’s immigration laws. His lack of experience and subsequent lack of understanding about the challenges that confront those who enforce and administer our immigration laws have apparently caused him to come to a very wrong and, indeed, dangerous conclusion, which may have influenced President Trump’s decision to provide lawful status and a pathway to United States citizenship to three times as many aliens as were covered by the Obama administration’s DACA program.
Gen. Kelly may not realize that many of those applicants may be successfully gaming the immigration system by committing immigration fraud. They didn’t enroll not because they were lazy but because they weren’t present in the United States during the enrollment period and would falsely claim they were if a new program were to take effect. Indeed, if this program is created, many applicants might enter the United States in the months ahead, but claim they have been here for years.
On February 7, 2018 Politifact posted an article, In Context: John Kelly’s remarks on ‘lazy’ immigrants and DACA, that included this paragraph that was critical of Kelly and the President:
Kelly’s remarks drew criticism from lawmakers and advocates for immigrant rights who countered that the DACA population is hard-working and that the Trump administration is attempting to demonize immigrants.
That brief paragraph contains a major falsehood that, for decades, has permeated discussions and news coverage about the immigration crisis. The article referred to “advocates for immigrant rights” who were angered by Kelly’s statement, however, illegal aliens are not immigrants. That bit of semantic “sleight of language” of referring to all aliens as “immigrants” was devised during the Carter administration, as I noted in a previous article. The misuse of language is not about being “politically correct,” but about being Orwellian, employing Newspeak tactics to alter understandings and thoughts by altering language.
True immigrants already have “rights” in the United States. They are lawfully present and were placed on the pathway to United States citizenship the day that lawful immigrant status was conferred upon them. In order to qualify to become naturalized citizens, should they desire to do so, they would have to meet certain other requirements such as meeting time requirements in the United States and possessing “good moral conduct” as established in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The reporter who described the motivation behind Gen. Kelly’s statement as seeking to “demonize immigrants” was so eager to hurl criticisms at the Trump administration that she ignored that Gen. Kelly was likely simply being naive and, in that naivety, Kelly overlooked the real problem: the fact that many of these aliens may be committing fraud and were not actually present in the United States during the enrollment program during the Obama administration.
General Kelly lacks understanding about immigration, not because he isn’t intelligent, but because he lacks the experiences in immigration that my 30 years with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have provided me. This includes a one-year assignment to a pilot program with the unit that adjudicated the petitions U.S. citizens and resident aliens file for their alien spouses to receive lawful immigrant status in the United States.
To provide a bit of background, management at the INS in 1973 found that the number of such petitions had sky-rocketed and there were serious concerns about high levels of fraud being behind the surge in applications. The idea behind the pilot program was to make certain the petitioners and their spouses were actually living in a marital relationship. Aliens who were found to have been engaged in marriage fraud were immediately taken into custody and detained for deportation hearings. Within a few months the numbers of applications plummeted as the aliens came to the understanding that there would be consequences for participating in a fraud conspiracy. You could call this deterrence through enforcement. Laws only matter when those who violate the law know that they will face severe consequences.
Today, however, the number of such aliens and hence the applications are so great, no in-person interviews would be possible. No field investigations would be possible. The Adjudications Officers would have to make their decisions solely by reviewing applications and supporting documents provided by “undocumented” aliens. The veracity of these documents may be impossible to determine and, since nearly all of these documents do not include any biometric identifiers, it wold be all but impossible to know if the documents even actually relate to the alien applying for lawful status.
These aliens may well be imposters.
On May 20, 1997 I participated in my first congressional hearing. The House Immigration Subcommittee conducted a hearing on the issue of Visa Fraud and Immigration Benefits Application Fraud. When the Chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Lamar Smith, asked me if I had encountered a common problem during my tenure as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Examiner (the position now referred to as Adjudications Officers) and as an Immigration Special Agent, I replied by stating that imposters were a major concern.
Here we are more than twenty years after that hearing and we still have a huge and deadly problem created by our inability to always be certain as the true identities of applicants for visas and immigration benefits.
Incidentally, that hearing in 1997 was predicated on two deadly terror attacks carried out in the United States in 1993. In January 1993 a Pakistani national gained entry into the parking lot of CIA Headquarters in Virginia and opened fire with an AK-47, killing two CIA officers and wounding three others. The next month a bombing at the World Trade Center killed six innocent victims and injured more than one thousand people and inflicted an estimated half-billion dollars in damages and nearly toppled one of the 110-story buildings.
Both attacks were carried out by aliens from the Middle East who had gamed various elements of the immigration system. The apparent ringleader of the World Trade Center attack, Mahmud Abouhalima, as the Los Angeles Times reported on March 25, 1993, was the beneficiary of the 1986 Reagan amnesty. He gained lawful status under the Special Agricultural provisions of that massive amnesty program, which as principally authored and ram-rodded through Congress by then-Congressman Chuck Schumer.
These aliens may be in their mid-30’s, hence, there would be no way of knowing if they actually entered the United States before they were 16 years of age or entered the United States recently and are simply lying about their dates of entry. No record of entry is created when aliens evade the inspections process at ports of entry.
President Trump was absolutely spot-on in his insistence that the United States not admit aliens who cannot be vetted. This was the fundamental concern behind his Executive Order that came to be labeled a “Travel Ban,” which should have been referred to as an “Entry Restriction.” Furthermore, these aliens are citizens from countries around the world, as reported by the DHS.
Let us not forget that aliens who run our borders do not enter “undocumented,” a term that could have been devised by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. These aliens enter the United States without inspection and without vetting. Their presence in the United States remains unknown to our government until perhaps they commit a crime or participate in some other nefarious act.
Finally, an application for an immigration benefit can be approved in just minutes while the denial of an application can take days or longer. Denied applications may be subject to an appeal and therefore denials require extensive paperwork, reviewed by government attorneys, in anticipation of such challenges. This creates a huge incentive to approve nearly all of these applications to keep up with the flood of applications.
All factors considered, as I noted my recent article, any DACA solution must heed the 9/11 Commission findings, which pointed out how our immigration system’s vulnerabilities were exploited in the 2001 terrorist attacks. Fraud that will likely be committed by future DACA applicants, especially those who mysteriously failed to take advantage of the program while it was originally in effect, is a very serious concern that must be addressed with open eyes.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/daca_protest_columbus_circle_92918-e1519034293132.jpg360640Michael Cutlerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMichael Cutler2018-02-19 04:58:212018-02-19 05:07:04Aliens Who Didn’t Register Under DADA: ‘Lazy’ or Committing Fraud?
President Donald Trump is proposing a 10-year spending plan that never produces a balanced budget, and increases deficit spending by $7.2 trillion over the next decade.
The White House unveiled the $4.4 trillion fiscal year 2019 budget plan on Monday.
“The first message [is] you don’t have to spend it all, but if you do, this is how you spend it,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters Monday.
“The second message is: We are not condemned to trillion deficits forever. There is a way out of this.”
Trump’s first budget proposal balanced the budget over 10 years. The current Trump proposal doesn’t come near to doing so.
The White House budget director noted that last year he said the longer Congress waits to make spending reforms proposed in the president’s fiscal year 2018 proposal, the more difficult it will be to balance the budget.
“We didn’t make hardly any of the reforms. We sent up $54 billion worth of savings to the Hill last year, [and] they took about $5 billion worth of it,” Mulvaney said.
“They didn’t make any of the large structural changes we proposed. I probably could have made it balanced, but you all would have rightly excoriated us for using funny numbers, because it would have taken funny numbers to do it. These are real numbers.”
The proposal does attempt to bend the trajectory to lower deficits over 10 years by $3 trillion, according to the White House.
The White House calls the proposal “Efficient, Effective, Accountable: An American Budget.”
Presidential budget proposals are rarely passed by Congress. Last week, Congress approved a two-year deal to hike spending caps by $300 billion over two years, upsetting many fiscal conservatives, as it also increases spending by $153 billion more than the previous two budget deals combined.
“It’s certainly alarming to us that the budget is not balanced at any point,” Justin Bogie, senior policy analyst in fiscal affairs at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “The budget may not matter as a policy matter, but it demonstrates the direction the White House is striving for.”
Romina Boccia, deputy director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute at The Heritage Foundation, called the budget a “mixed bag.”
“The president’s budget makes progress by investing in the military, eliminating numerous ineffective agencies and programs, and beginning the process of welfare and entitlement reform. However, the budget fails to balance, ever, and does not sufficiently move the country away from its currently unsustainable fiscal path,” she said.
The budget proposal fully funds the national defense strategy with $716 billion. This includes a 2.6 percent pay hike for troops.
Trump’s signature campaign issue, immigration and border security, gets a boost in the proposal at a time when Congress has started to debate how to address illegal immigrants brought to the United States as minors.
Mulvaney said he anticipates having a deal on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients and the wall.
The budget proposal asks Congress for $23 billion for border security and immigration enforcement. Of that, $18 billion goes for a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Also, $782 million would go to to hire 2,750 additional officers and agents at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Another $2.7 billion would go to pay for an average daily detention capacity of 52,000 illegal immigrants.
Trump is asking for $17 billion to fight the opioid abuse epidemic.
The Trump administration wants Congress to dedicate $85.5 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical care.
Having already done away with the individual mandate, the chief financing mechanism of Obamacare, in the tax reform package that passed in late 2017, the Trump budget seeks to take another step on health care. The proposal includes the idea of $1.6 trillion in health care block grants to states, which was part of the bill sponsored by Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
The budget proposal also calls for numerous civil service reforms to ensure the federal government can “hire the best and fire the worst.” The proposal largely deals with reforming the hiring system, moving to a more merit-based pay system for federal workers, and making it easier to fire bad employees. Trump already signed a similar reform in place during his first year, but it only affected the Department of Veterans Affairs. This reform is aimed across government.
Trust in the mainstream media is at a historic low—and rightfully so given the behavior of many journalists in Washington, D.C.
Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.
Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.
Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. That’s why The Daily Signal exists.
The Daily Signal’s mission is to give Americans the real, unvarnished truth about what is happening in Washington and what must be done to save our country.
Our dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts rely on the financial support of patriots like you.
Your donation helps us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and report the facts.
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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of White House budget director Mick Mulvaney speaking during a news briefing Monday at the White House about President Donald Trump’s budget propsal for fiscal year 2019. (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters/Newscom)
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/budget-2019-1250x650-e1518522268444.jpg354640The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2018-02-13 06:45:262018-02-14 06:57:13Trump Budget Proposal Projects Deficit Spending for Next Decade
On February 6, TheNew York Timespublished a chilling reporton the arrest in Oklahoma of a foreign national who had attended an al Qaeda training camp. The defendant in this case is Naif Abdulaziz M. Alfallaj, a 34-year-old citizen of Saudi Arabia who has been residing in the U.S. since 2011. Allegedly he attended a terror training camp in Afghanistan in 2000 when four of the 9/11 hijacker/terrorists also attended training sessions at that very same camp.
Here is an excerpt from the Justice Department’s press releaseon the arrest:
According to the (criminal) complaint, the FBI found 15 of Alfallaj’s fingerprints on an application to an al Qaeda training camp, known as al Farooq, which was one of al Qaeda’s key training sites in Afghanistan. The document was recovered by the U.S. military from an al Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan. The document is also alleged to include an emergency contact number associated with Alfallaj’s father in Saudi Arabia. Alfallaj is alleged to have first entered the U.S. in late 2011 on a nonimmigrant visa based on his wife’s status as a foreign student. According to the complaint, he answered several questions on his visa application falsely, including whether he had ever supported terrorists or terrorist organizations.
The indictment returned today charges two counts of visa fraud. Count One alleges that from March 2012 to the present, Alfallaj possessed a visa obtained by fraud. Count Two alleges he used that visa in October 2016 to apply for lessons at a private flight school in Oklahoma. The third count in the indictment charges Alfallaj with making a false statement to the FBI during a terrorism investigation when he was interviewed and denied ever having associated with anyone from a foreign terrorist group.
This is a “good news/bad news” story.
It is certainly impressive that our government was able to uncover the evidence upon which this criminal case is based, however, he was lawfully admitted into the United States in 2011, more than a decade after he received terror training. He has been in the United States for about seven years and his presence in the United States only came to the attention of the FBI when he sought pilot training in October 2016.
It was discovered that he had lied when he applied for his visa to enter the United States by concealing his connection to terrorism.
This case causes me to have a sort of flashback to the congressional hearing at which I testified on March 19, 2002. The title of the hearing was the “INS’s Notification of Approval of Change of Status for Pilot Training for Terrorist Hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.”
The C-SPAN video of that hearing is one that every member of Congress and the leadership of DHS, the State Department and other agencies of the Trump administration should be required to watch, especially as they contemplate calling into action a bureaucracy that continues to demonstrate its ineptitude in effectively screening aliens applicants for immigration benefits.
I have frequently noted in many of my articles and in my testimony before congressional hearings that the 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud as the key entry and embedding tactic of terrorists. This is why the second largest contingent of law enforcement personnel assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) are ICE agents.
As a former INS agent I don’t like to speculate, I certainly prefer to deal with facts, however, there are some very serious and obvious questions that the Alfallaj case raises.
While it may be that Alfallaj had no nefarious purposes for taking pilot training, it is impossible to not consider the that Alfallaj is a “sleeper agent,” that is to say, an enemy combatant who entered the United States with the ultimate goal of participating in a deadly attack. If so, was he planning to participate in a hijacking of an airliner with others who perhaps have yet to be identified? Or was he perhaps planning to complete his flight training and then use a rented airplane as a weapon?
Having considered the case of Alfallaj, we must contemplate President Trump’s offer to provide 1.6 million DACA aliens with lawful status and pathway to citizenship.
Purportedly these illegal aliens entered the United States as children and hence had no control over their situation. However, because they may be in their mid 30’s it is entirely possible that a significant number of them may lie about their actual dates of entry and that, although they claimed that they entered as children, they may well have entered relatively recently as adults.
Furthermore, these aliens are citizens from countries around the world, as reported by the DHS.
I addressed my misgivings about the the president’s plans in a recent article, DACA Solution Must Heed 9/11 Commission Findings. In conducting their deliberations about President Trump’s solution for DACA illegal aliens, members of Congress must take into account that the adjudications process would be conducted by a division of the DHS, along with other agencies that have failed, time and again, to properly vet aliens who have turned out to be terrorists and/or criminals.
President Trump ignited a firestorm, awhile back, when he issued executive orders to prevent the entry of aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism who could not be effectively vetted by our officials. President Trump’s stand on this issue was entirely proper and prudent, given the totality of circumstances. As I noted in an article back then, a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182, provides the President of the United States with the discretionary authority to imposed such restrictions even though he was enjoined by judges from implementing his orders.
The President is still very much concerned about the vetting process for aliens seeking entry into the United States to prevent the entry of terrorists and criminals. Indeed, during his State of the Union Address, when he discussed the second of his “four pillars” for reforming the immigration system, he referred to the “loopholes” by which criminals and terrorists enter the United States. In reality, there are no “loopholes” but fraud that goes undetected and a lack of integrity of the immigration system.
Nevertheless the President is willing to rely on that same system to legalize 1.8 million DACA aliens. It is likely that even more aliens would file applications, many laden with fraud information and claims.
After the attacks of 9/11 we were frequently told that for America to be safe, our officials had to “get it right 100% of the time” while in order for the terrorists to succeed, they only had to “get it right once.” Every application filed by an alien for a visa or for lawful status provides terrorists with that opportunity of “getting it right.”
Before 9/11, no agency of the U.S. government systematically analyzed terrorists’ travel strategies. Had they done so, they could have discovered the ways in which the terrorist predecessors to al Qaeda had been systematically but detectably exploiting weaknesses in our border security since the early 1990s.
We found that as many as 15 of the 19 hijackers were potentially vulnerable to interception by border authorities. Analyzing their characteristic travel documents and travel patterns could have allowed authorities to intercept 4 to 15 hijackers and more effective use of information available in U.S. government databases could have identified up to 3 hijackers.
Looking back, we can also see that the routine operations of our immigration laws-that is, aspects of those laws not specifically aimed at protecting against terrorism-inevitably shaped al Qaeda’s planning and opportunities. Because they were deemed not to be bona fide tourists or students as they claimed, five conspirators that we know of tried to get visas and failed, and one was denied entry by an inspector. We also found that had the immigration system set a higher bar for determining whether individuals are who or what they claim to be-and ensuring routine consequences for violations-it could potentially have excluded, removed, or come into further contact with several hijackers who did not appear to meet the terms for admitting short-term visitors.
Our investigation showed that two systemic weaknesses came together in our border system’s inability to contribute to an effective defense against the 9/11 attacks: a lack of well-developed counterterrorism measures as a part of border security and an immigration system not able to deliver on its basic commitments, much less support counterterrorism.
The succession of terror attacks carried out by aliens who gamed the immigration system and acquired political asylum, lawful immigrant status and even citizenship, prove just how incapable that system is to deal with its current workload of 6 million applications annually, sounding alarms the President must hear.
False security is worse — far, far worse — than no security, particularly where terrorists are concerned.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Naif-Abdulaziz-M.-Alfallaj.jpg360640Michael Cutlerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMichael Cutler2018-02-09 04:09:512018-02-09 18:49:01Saudi Graduate of al Qaeda Terror Camp Arrested in Oklahoma
In 2015, the Obama administration finalized its infamous “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule—also known as the Clean Water Rule—that sought to regulate almost every type of water imaginable under the Clean Water Act.
To its credit, the Trump administration is taking action to get rid of this rule by withdrawing it and then issuing a new definition of what waters are covered under the Clean Water Rule.
This process, though, will require significant litigation as lawsuits pile up in an effort to block the administration from protecting the environment in a manner that also respects property rights, federalism, and the rule of law.
In fact, the litigation is already getting underway.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just finalized a rule that would delay the applicability date of the WOTUS rule by two years. This action helps give the agencies time to work through the regulatory process without rushing, and ensures that during this time, the WOTUS rule won’t go into effect.
Given uncertainty about litigation in multiple district courts over the 2015 rule, this action provides certainty and consistency to the regulated community and the public, and minimizes confusion as the agencies reconsider the definition of the ‘waters of the United States’ that should be covered under the Clean Water Act.
This commonsense delay, though, apparently didn’t please New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. He recently announced that he was going to sue the administration for this new rule to delay the Obama administration WOTUS rule.
He explained, “The Trump administration’s suspension of these vital protections [the WOTUS Rule] is reckless and illegal.”
He also stated, “Make no mistake: Abandoning the Clean Water Rule will mean pollution, flooding, and harm to fish and wildlife in New York and across the country—undermining decades of work to protect and enhance our water resources.”
He makes it sound as if the WOTUS rule is the only thing protecting us from Armageddon. But in fact it is new policy and hasn’t even gone into effect—so how does it have anything to do with decades of environmental protection? It isn’t as though nixing the WOTUS rule means there will be no environmental protections.
It’s hard to see how a federal power grab that would regulate what most people would consider dry land is so critical to water, or why making it more difficult for farmers to engage in normal farming practices is going to be good for New York and the country.
Is the regulation of man-made ditches a must? Is it really a must for the agencies to regulate waters that can’t even be seen by the naked eye? Should the federal government act as a de facto local zoning board and intrude on traditional state and local power? Do we need to trample on property rights to protect the environment?
These are all effects of the WOTUS rule.
Maybe Schneiderman and others who want to block the administration from getting rid of one of the most egregious federal rules in recent memory think these are all good impacts. Most people, though, likely think otherwise.
There is an underlying assumption held by many of those who welcome such federal overreach: the federal government must regulate almost every water because there is no other alternative. They choose to ignore the fact that even the Clean Water Act expressly recognizes that states are supposed to play a leading role in addressing water pollution.
They see regulation as the only solution to any alleged water problems, not other government alternatives and especially not private means of protecting the environment. Respect for property rights, the rule of law, and federalism apparently are not important.
What should be important to them and certainly to most people is a clean environment. An overboard and vague rule though that seeks to regulate almost every water and ignores states is harmful to the environment, and this is precisely how to describe the WOTUS rule.
By developing a new rule that recognizes the need to work with states to address water issues, the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers will be helping the environment, not hurting it. A clear and objective rule, unlike the mess that is the WOTUS rule, helps both the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers with enforcement and makes consistent compliance by regulated entities far more likely.
The Trump administration appears to recognize the importance for such a new rule. It is unfortunate that some will use lawsuits to make it more difficult for them to achieve this critical objective.
Ultimately, Congress needs to clarify in the Clean Water Act exactly what waters are considered to be “waters of the United States,” because even if the Trump administration comes up with the greatest rule in history, a future administration could easily undo that excellent work.
In the interim, though, Congress needs to step in and eliminate unnecessary obstacles for the administration as it seeks to move forward with a new rule.
Daren Bakst studies and writes about agriculture subsidies, property rights, environmental policy, food labeling and related issues as The Heritage Foundation’s research fellow in agricultural policy. Read his research. Twitter: @darenbakst.
A Note for our Readers:
Trust in the mainstream media is at a historic low—and rightfully so given the behavior of many journalists in Washington, D.C.
Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.
Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.
Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. That’s why The Daily Signal exists.
The Daily Signal’s mission is to give Americans the real, unvarnished truth about what is happening in Washington and what must be done to save our country.
Our dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts rely on the financial support of patriots like you.
Your donation helps us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and report the facts.
You deserve the truth about what’s going on in Washington.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/TrumpPruitt-1250x650-e1517915755591.jpg364640The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2018-02-06 06:16:592018-02-06 06:16:59Trump Is Repealing Obama’s Harmful Water Rule. Why Efforts to Stop Him Are Misguided.
Conservatives know that. That’s why they want to 
