As we’ve already made more than plain here at Hard Astarboard, we completely support the bill recently signed by Arizona’s governor that, when you come right down to it, only reiterates federal immigration laws that the federal government has been shirking their duty to enforce.

Arizona has been hard hit by the toll of illegal immigration, from the violence in the border region, to the Mexican drug trafficking into their state, to the crime, loss of revenues and jobs and other effects of a flood of illegals, so they decided to do something about it, and did.

So what happens?

Other states like California, which has been hurt by criminal immigration but continues to pride itself on being a sanctuary state, are kvetching about Arizona’s anti-immigration law, but hey! States’ rights are firmly etched into the U.S. Constitution, and if Arizona feels this is in its own best interests, it is within its right to do so.

As far as this is concerned, well…

Thousands of people from around the country marched to the Arizona state Capitol on Saturday to protest the state’s tough new crackdown on illegal immigration.

Marchers carrying signs, banners and flags from the United States and Mexico filled a five-mile stretch of central Phoenix. Dozens of police officers lined the route, and helicopters hovered overhead.

Police declined to estimate the size of the crowd, but it appeared at least 10,000 to 20,000 protesters braved temperatures that were forecast to reach 95 degrees by mid-afternoon. Organizers had said they expected the demonstration to bring as many as 50,000 people.

…if the photo in the linked article is any indication, it seems like this is a largely Mexican event; I wonder what the percentage of protesters is that are Latinos, as opposed to white bread “progressives”? Granted, there’ll undoubtedly prove, at the end of the day, to have been a few thousand gringos in evidence, but then as Seth, a veteran of numerous demonstrations and counter-demonstrations has told me, the lefties tend to bus in multitudes of people to these events to bolster up their showing, basically a propaganda move — to make it look like there are a hell of a lot more people who support their agendas enough to find their own way to an event than there actually are.

Having said that,

Q. Why don’t these people from other states, likely a number of which are not being smothered as much by illegal immigration problems as Arizona has been, simply stay in their own states and mind their own business?

A. Because they’re treasonous, pink, faggot, commie liberals “progressives”, meaning that they don’t know how to mind their own business, not when there’s an opportunity available to force their anti-America programs down the throats of the unwilling.

Before I get into this, I should say that yesterday? I broke out the ol’ satellite dish on the boat and watched part of the U.S. Coast Guard & Minerals Management Service Joint Investigation hearings at Kenner, Louisiana.

I say “part of it” because that was all I could stomach.

You see, BP had one of their professional liars at the hearing, one of those ivy league educated goons whose job it is to obfuscate without appearing to do so, yet who are so obviously lying with the proverbial practiced straight face that it should turn the stomach on any honest man.

Well enough said about that except, oh, yeah, for Seth, his being an ex-coastie and all: Two U.S. Coast Guard officers have now completed BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEALs) training, and three more coasties are in the pipeline.

These new SEALs, after their graduation at Coronado, will return to the Coast Guard, bringing their new skills to bear within the homeland security segments of the maritime military force’s responsibilities.

Now, what, I ask, is this? Still more skullduggery by the White House branch of the corrupt Chicago political machine? I’ve been out on the boat for the last couple of days and may have missed something since then, but…

With all the attention on President Obama’s bungling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the news of Congressional calls for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate of an alleged job offer by the Obama Administration to get Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA) out of the Pennsylvania Senate race has been pushed down the news pages. This is a serious matter and something that will not be brushed aside. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), former Bush Administration official Karl Rove and Senate Judiciary Republicans have raised the issue that somebody in the Obama Administration may have committed a felony.

Wow, someone in the Obama Administration might have committed a felony?

I mean,

This Administration has held themselves out to be more ethical than administrations of the past. President Obama’s declared in his inaugural address on January 21, 2009 that:

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This “new era of responsibility” should include an open discussion by the President about whether they did offer Congressman Sestak a job to get out of the primary race for the Democrat nomination to be the next Senator from the state of Pennsylvania.
The White House Web Site promises transparency and accountability right now:

President Obama has consistently made clear that he will strive to lead the most open, transparent, and accountable government in history. Whether it is reigning in the influence of lobbyists in Washington, bringing unprecedented accountability to federal spending, opening doors to engagement with the American public, or shutting down the “revolving door” that carries special interest influence in and out of the government, the highest standards will be sought in every thing the federal government does.

…the most open, transparent, and accountable government in history.

When does that come into effect?

Those promises will be tested over the next few weeks with calls by some Republicans for the Obama Administration to come clean about an alleged job offer to Sestak. Karl Rove has alleged that one of two things are true: either Sestak is lying;

or, a crime may have been committed by somebody in the Obama Administration.

Karl Rove via the L.A. Times as quoted on the Fox News Channel:

One of two things is true, you can’t have two things true. One or the other is true. Either Joe Sestak is lying and he was not offered a position in the administration in return for getting out of the primary. You know he’s a liar, in which case not worthy of public service. Or, he’s telling the truth, in which case somebody inside the White House committed a felony. 18 USC 211 says that, a government official cannot promise a job in return for anything of value and it has a long list of values.

The entire article is here.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet that this gets ignored as much as possible by the quasi communist editors within the mainstream media.

In today’s Jewish World Review:

Libertarian Rand Paul, Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, shocked many conservatives when he refused to give full-throated support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act criminalized public sector racial discrimination, and struck down laws that required discrimination and segregation. But it went much further. It outlawed racial discrimination by private actors such as restaurant and hotel owners who refused to serve blacks.

Yes, it did.

Funnily enough, though, we have here a bill that was passed by Republicans whose stipulation, as described above, was extension of its equality provisions to the private sector. Since we all know that it was Democrats who were doing most of the persecuting (see the all Democrat, all the time KKK as a prime example), the Republicans were, in effect, protecting the rights of blacks from Democrats.

Now a libertarian, who by definition is much closer to a Republican than to a Democrat, who says he doesn’t believe the government should force private businessmen to tow the line, is under fire from the Democrats, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to begin with.

The word “convoluted” comes to my mind.

Rand’s critics also unintentionally expose the condescending way “compassionate conservatives” deem that blacks — still standing after slavery and Jim Crow — are in need of protection by rare “noble” whites from the bigot-infested world through which blacks are obviously incapable of navigating. Why else throw overboard the just and basic principle that private actors, short of engaging in force or fraud, should behave as they wish?

What about the pro-life pharmacist who considers it immoral to stock and sell the morning-after pill? What about the landlady who thinks homosexuality is immoral and refuses to rent to a gay couple? What if she refuses to rent to an illegal alien? What about the “morally straight” Boy Scouts organization that discriminates against an openly gay scoutmaster? What about the healthy 25-year-old who refuses to purchase health insurance?

Republicans go all deer-in-the-headlights when someone questions their colorblind bona fides. But when Nazi sympathizers want publicly to march, many conservatives correctly defend the “right.” Constitutional rights extend to both saints and sinners and those in between, no matter the outrage — in this instance of Jewish Holocaust survivors over the prospect of swastika-wearing fascists parading through their neighborhood.

This is freedom 101.

I find Larry Elder’s point of view highly defensable, and by extension, Rand Paul’s. Now, I also understand that the name “Paul” is not among the favorites in the GOP’s house, but on the other hand, because Rand Paul is actually right here, I wonder why the Republicans can’t seem to find the time to lend him just a little support.

Oh, I forgot.

No matter how hard they are now fighting to protect our liberty from Obama and his lefties, they are still the same Republicans who let us down in the first half of this decade and as a result lost both houses of Congress to the “progressive” lefty legions of Pelosi and Reid, and they don’t want to rock any vote-getting boats that might restore them to the majority on Capital Hill…So they can revert back to the lackadaisical, complacent, “career first, America second” fatcats they were before.

The well-intended, but misguided, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — as applied to private conduct — sought to change not only whites’ behavior but also their “feelings.” Some blacks perceive racial hostility toward them from their local Korean grocer. But if treated with a smile and offered quality goods at fair prices, most blacks patronize the store. People expect and respond to a certain measure of respect as a customer, regardless of how the proprietors may personally “feel” about them.

Instead of defending Paul on this issue against race-card-playing leftists like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, conservatives/Republicans/pundits panicked. How are we to get the country back on the course set by its Founders if we cannot stand with the Rand Pauls of the nation on the bedrock principle of maximum personal liberty?

Well said.

I so enjoy it when a major liberal “progressive” player is the loudest voice in the condemnation of one of his own ilk (that may not be fair, actually, because Obama seems, actually, to be an ilk of his own).

Democratic political strategist James Carville, a resident of Louisiana, slammed President Obama this morning for the “political stupidity” of his response to the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The president doesn’t get down here in the middle of this… I have no idea of why they didn’t seize this thing,” Carville said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I have no idea of why their attitude was so hands off here.”

The White House has been on the defensive about its response to the spill, which began when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Millions of gallons of oil have already spilled into the Gulf, and government agencies are still working with BP to try and cap the leak.

The administration is stressing the fact that it has sent thousands of response vessels and thousands of personnel, including top cabinet officials, to the scene. However, the president himself has only made one brief appearance in the region since the spill began and has only spoken publicly about the incident six times in the past five weeks, according to CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller.

A CBS News poll released yesterday shows 35 percent of people approve of the administration’s handling of the spill, while 45 percent disapprove.

“The president of the United States could’ve come down here, he could’ve been involved with the families of these 11 people” who died in the explosion, Carville said. “He could’ve demanded a plan in anticipation of this.”

He added, “It just looks like he’s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this.”

Mr. Obama will head back to the Louisiana Gulf Coast on Friday. On Thursday, he is scheduled to receive a report from Interior Secretary Salazar on the spill and will take questions from reporters on the situation. He is also expected to announce new, strengthened inspections for offshore drilling, the Washington Post reports.

All above emphasis was added by me.

Now Obama knows what Bush felt like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, while Bush and the GOP didn’t accept any campaign contributions from Katrina, the same was not the case between Obama, the Democrats and BP.

While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

On top of that, the oil giant has spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

Do tell…

Let’s shoot over to the Deepwater Horizon:

BP started pumping heavy mud into the leaking Gulf of Mexico well Wednesday and said everything was going as planned in the company’s boldest attempt yet to plug the gusher that has spewed millions of gallons of oil over the last five weeks.

BP hoped the mud could overpower the steady stream of oil, but chief executive Tony Hayward said it would be at least 24 hours before officials know whether the attempt has been successful. The company wants to eventually inject cement into the well to permanently seal it.

Go on…

Meanwhile, dozens of witness statements obtained by The Associated Press show a combination of equipment failure and a deference to the chain of command impeded the system that should have stopped the gusher before it became an environmental disaster.

What!? Obama’s good friends and contributors in BP’s Chain of Command were responsible, through negligence?

In a handwritten statement to the Coast Guard obtained by the AP, Transocean rig worker Truitt Crawford said: “I overheard upper management talking saying that BP was taking shortcuts by displacing the well with saltwater instead of mud without sealing the well with cement plugs, this is why it blew out.

At a Coast Guard hearing in New Orleans, Doug Brown, chief rig mechanic aboard the platform, testified that the trouble began at a meeting hours before the blowout, with a “skirmish” between a BP official and rig workers who did not want to replace heavy drilling fluid in the well with saltwater.

The switch presumably would have allowed the company to remove the fluid and use it for another project, but the seawater would have provided less weight to counteract the surging pressure from the ocean depths.

Brown said the BP official, whom he identified only as the “company man,” overruled the drillers, declaring, “This is how it’s going to be.” Brown said the top Transocean official on the rig grumbled, “Well, I guess that’s what we have those pinchers for,” which he took to be a reference to devices on the blowout preventer, the five-story piece of equipment that can slam a well shut in an emergency.

Can’t President Obama find any playmates and friends who don’t make him look bad on the basis of mere association?

Maybe not, because after all, birds of a feather flock together.

There were a number of reasons why George W. Bush’s administration didn’t become proactive in Louisiana, as quickly as the lefty media crowed that he should have, during the Katrina debacle, one being that state’s Governor Blanco’s refusing (her legal right as a governor) to accept Bush’s help when it was offered and for some hours to come, others related to the fact that the breached levees, the floods and so forth were a first-time occurrance, in modern history (in Obamanese “unprecedented”), for these events in that region.

However, there were less reasons, especially after Katrina had given the emergency planners a crash course in addressing the same kind of problems they recently had with flooding in Tennessee, for the Obama Administration’s response therein.

Now, we’ve got the big oil kerfuffle down in the Gulf of Mexico and the damage it’s doing all along that coast, from Texas to Florida, and the response to it, from the Obama crowd, leaves much more to be desired. Much, much more.

So where are the anti-Obama diatribes from the liberal “progressive” media? .

And what’s the Obama Administration doing?

Priorities, folks: priorities. Apparently Lisa Jackson figures that if Interior Dept CoS Tom Strickland could go white-water rafting while the oil spread, she can go raise money for the Democrats:

As the Obama administration struggles to contain the massive oil spill threatening the Louisiana coast, one of its top environmental officials will be the featured attraction at a fundraiser for Senate Democrats next week in Manhattan, at which donors are promised they can speak to her about their “issues of concern.”

I have an ‘issue of concern:’ the Governor of Louisiana is shouting at the federal government to sign off on emergency sand berms to keep the oil away from wetlands; and the administration is dithering. So, several questions, here:

• When was the EPA planning to help with that?
• Was the EPA planning to help with that at all?
• If it’s not… why? I mean, I can guess, but the nicest answer implies rank partisanship on Jackson’s part, and rapidly degenerates from there. And I mean really rapidly degenerates.

Lisa Jackson can answer these at her leisure: after all, it’s not like there’s an acute ecological crisis going on right now…

So, from the “dithering” link above:

As federal agencies continue to study the state’s proposal to build a chain of sand barriers along the Louisiana coast, Gov. Bobby Jindal and other state and local leaders are heightening the rhetorical battle against the federal government’s delays in giving a clear “yes” or “no” to the expansive, $350 million proposal.

As proposed, the plan would build up a mostly continuous chain of six-foot sand berms stretching more than 80 miles east and west of the Mississippi River in an attempt to keep oil out of coastal wetlands. The Army Corps of Engineers and Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the oil spill, offered few new details on the likelihood of approval Monday.

Allen cited several logistical challenges with the state’s proposal during a White House news conference Monday afternoon, though he said the Coast Guard and corps are still considering it.

“Building a set of barrier islands and berms that large would take a very, very long time — even by the state’s own estimates six to nine months in some cases — and a significant amount of resources associated with that might be applied elsewhere,” Allen said.

As proposed, the sand dredging would be an unprecedented engineering effort, requiring as many as 18 dredges to be mobilized from across the country to begin building up islands. There are substantial questions about whether the berms could be built in time to stop the oil. And several scientists and environmental experts have cautioned that the hasty approach could jeopardize future barrier island restoration efforts by depleting the state’s limited offshore sand resources.

So here, we have the right-thinking incumbent governor of New Orleans, Bobby Lindal, begging the government (under Obama, not only is the governor aggressively seeking help from the government, but all he’s getting in return is a lot of hemming and hawing from an administration that, simply put, does not belong in the White House, because they do not possess the leadership abilities that would qualify them to be there, let alone any unsolicited offers of assistance.

On Monday, Jindal and Sen. David Vitter pushed the plan again in a news conference with congressional leaders, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

“Every day that it’s not approved is another day the choice is made for us” to allow oil to seep into coastal marshes, Jindal said.

And Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell sent a forceful letter over the weekend to Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, the commanding general of the corps, asking for “prompt approval” of the emergency permits to begin dredging. Caldwell in the letter says the federal government does not have the right to block a state from doing emergency response activities to prevent environmental damage and urged Van Antwerp to issue the permit and avoid “an unnecessary constitutional confrontation between the state and federal governments.”

If the corps does not OK the plan, Caldwell wrote, “I will have no choice but to advise the Governor to go forward with our plans to construct the barrier islands without a fill permit from the Corps in order to set up a legal test of your constitutional and statutory authority.”

Officials with the corps did not return e-mail messages seeking a response to Caldwell’s letter on Monday.

At least Bush attempted, very quickly and though put off by the Democrat then “governing” Louisiana, to get the federal government mobilized. Not so Obama in this instance. The only “help” his administration is interested in providing is in the areas of oppressive federal regulation in and manipulation of the private sector.

Well, all you wildlife, wetlands and environmental “buffs” who supported Obama’s election to the presidency, how do you like him now? He’s fiddling while your version of Rome is burning. Diddling around while your precious nature is being well oiled, greased, saturated with petroleum and your animals and birds are slowly dying.

Your hero, your messiah, your agent of Hope and Change is really working hard for you, isn’t he?

Now pay the price, you gullible asses.

Today, instead of being the one doing the talking, I’ll leave it to two others, one a well known columnist, the other a fellow blogger.

The first one, which caught my eye (actually, both of ‘em) this morning, is by David Limbaugh, in which he delivers an adroitly thought out yet brief synapsis of why the socialism being forced on us by Obama and his leftist cronies hasn’t worked, isn’t working and –surprise — never will work.

Liberals have a learning disability when it comes to the impracticability of socialism. They are so steeped in the seductive lies of false compassion that no amount of logic, history or everyday experience registers. Thus, they continue to burden the market system to an unsustainable level.

Liberals have always denied they intend to unduly shackle the free market. They say America is exceptionally prosperous — though it never occurs to them why — and can afford robust entitlement and redistributive schemes. But in no way would they favor anything extreme that would push the market to the tipping point.

Well, now that they are completely in charge, we’ve seen what they will do. Obama liberals believe not in America’s promise (and Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope) of equality of opportunity, but in equality of outcomes. Truth be told, Obama probably believes in a wholesale reversal of wealth distribution: not just equalizing it, but making the wealthy poor and the poor wealthy. But I’ll leave the psychoanalysis to others.

Jumping a ways…

…It’s not that Obama has not focused enough on the economy because he’s been preoccupied with his agenda. It’s that his agenda is incompatible with fixing the economy because it is destroying the human spirit and its capacity for productivity, not to mention that it, and his method of implementing it, are wholly inconsistent with any powers the framers’ contemplated for the federal government.

Like Seth’s always saying: The greatest flaw in liberals’ agendas is that they never fail to go against the grain of Human Nature.

Read David Limbaugh’s entire column here.

The second one comes from Michael at Flight Pundit, and was his last post to date, from back in February (I hope he hasn’t decided to hang up his spurs). I found the blog while surfing this site’s blogroll, but anyway:

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases. For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009. Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

The chart that follows within and the post in its entirety are here.

Of course, so-called “progressives” epitomize the kind of thinking, as well, that condones something like this.

Reminiscent of the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan showing up to terrorize families in their homes, the Service Employees International Union (SIEU) and a Chicago group called National Political Action showed up at the Maryland home of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate affairs at Bank of America last Sunday.

The White House has yet to denounce the muscle flexing by their SEIU buddies whose purpose was to intimidate the senior bank executive and make him an example to all those who might oppose the Democrats’ new finance bill now headed for conference with the House and Senate.

Baer wasn’t home that Sunday but his 14-year-old son was home alone. And frightened.
Now why have a protest and not invite the media?

Well, not the real media anyway.

The far-left Huffington Post was the only media invited along for the show to ensure narrow coverage of the terrorization of the Baer family in their own home. David Duke would be proud.

The only reason we’re finding out the real story is that Nina Easton of CNN lives next door to the Baer family. Oops!

Easton reports:
“Waving signs denouncing bank ‘greed,’ hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

“Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.

“‘Excuse me,’ Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”

You can read Easton’s full, harrowing account of the terrorization of her neighbors here.

From Nina Easton’s article, linked just above:

Now this event would accurately be called a “protest” if it were taking place at, say, a bank or the U.S. Capitol. But when hundreds of loud and angry strangers are descending on your family, your children, and your home, a more apt description of this assemblage would be “mob.” Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise, and it worked-even on the police. A trio of officers who belatedly answered our calls confessed a fear that arrests might “incite” these trespassers.

What’s interesting is that SEIU, the nation’s second largest union, craves respectability. Just-retired president Andy Stern is an Obama friend and regular White House visitor. He sits on the President’s Fiscal Responsibility Commission. He hobnobs with those greedy Wall Street CEOs — executives much higher-ranking than my neighbor Baer — at Davos. His union spent $70 million getting Democrats elected in 2008.

In the business community, though, SEIU has a reputation for strong-arm tactics against management, prompting some companies to file suit.

Now those strong-arm tactics, stirred by supposedly free-floating (as opposed to organized) populist rage, have come to the neighborhood curb. Last year it was AIG executives — with protestors met by security guard outside. Now it’s any executive — and they’re on the front stoop. After Baer’s house, the 14 buses left to descend on the nearby residence of Peter Scher, a government relations executive at JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500).

Targeting homes and families seems to put SEIU in the ranks of (now jailed) radical animal-rights activists and the Kansas anti-gay fundamentalists harassing the grieving parents of a dead 20-year-old soldier at his funeral (the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the latter). But that’s not a conversation that SEIU officials want to have.

I don’t suppose it is.

This is the kind of thing liberals applaud, as they have little sense of decency, only a laissez faire attitude when it comes to forcing their unwanted points of view on everybody else. The end justifies the means.

Liberals love unions, as long as there are no unions involved in businesses they themselves own.

But back to the Kay Kay Kay (a southern Democrat organization, by the way) style tactics employed by SEIU: This is the kind of thing that happens, and that the thugs get away with, when the MSM is run mostly by liberals (as it is now), because the bias of a left wing media will guarantee that such things, perpetrated by their own kind, will receive very little press coverage.

Nope.

Congress is apparently being overlooked as well where our supposedly transparent Administration is concerned.

A top lawmaker on the House intelligence committee said Sunday the Obama administration is withholding information about the botched Times Square bombing from Congress, continuing a pattern in which Capitol Hill isn’t getting the information it needs to conduct oversight.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the panel’s ranking Republican, said he agrees with the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, who last week sent a letter to the White House accusing the administration of putting national security in jeopardy by failing to keep lawmakers apprised of the probe into suspect Faisal Shahzad.

“Having to fight over access to counterterrorism information is not productive and ultimately makes us less secure,” wrote Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chairman Christopher S. Bond in a letter to President Obama on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s against the law, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t Congress supposed to be apprised of such things, what with the U.S. not being a dictatorship?

Mr. Hoekstra said the lack of information prevents Congress from evaluating whether the government is adequately prepared to thwart future attacks.

“One of these days there will be an attack, it will be successful, and then people will want to know what was done and why weren’t things done to stop it, and it will all be on the heads of this administration because they ran it and they didn’t involve Congress in the process,” he said. “On the most recent terrorist attacks they’ve given us no opportunity, no invitation to work with them, to enhance or modify our intelligence tools … and that we did everything we could to try to get them to work and be more open about it.”

In the letter, the senators say U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly refused to provide relevant information on the Times Square case that would allow the committee to conduct oversight without hampering the ongoing investigation. Senate intelligence staffers were told that the Department of Justice had instructed the agencies not to convey information on the Times Square plot without its approval, they said.

However:

The White House wouldn’t comment on the charges…

What’s new?

…but a spokesman for the Justice Department said the department reached out to Congress “shortly after” the May 1 incident, providing information by phone and e-mail beginning on May 3.

Spokesman Dean Boyd said officials from the FBI, Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center provided a classified briefing to members of the House intelligence panel on May 6 and briefed their Senate counterparts on May 11. He also said the Justice Department did not tell intelligence officials not to cooperate with lawmakers.

“The Justice Department did not order anyone in the intelligence community to withhold information from the Senate intelligence committee in connection with the attempted bombing,” Mr. Boyd said. “In fact, when the Justice Department was notified by certain intelligence agencies that they were planning to make calls to the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Justice Department encouraged those agencies to do so.”

A spokeswoman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, head of the House intelligence panel, said the Texas Democrat — the only one of his counterparts not to sign — was generally “pleased at the detailed level and the timeliness of the briefing, given we were briefed less than 72 hours after Shahzad’s arrest.”

Reyes, a combat vet, was a career mover and shaker on the U.S. Border Patrol, but he is also one of today’s Democrats, who haven’t exactly distinguished themselves of late in the “protect and defend the Constitution” arena.

“So,” we ask, “what’s the story?”

But, Mr. Hoekstra countered:

Ah! A “but”!

“It’s a joke when the administration says ‘well, Justice, they’re fully cooperating and they’re telling everybody else to cooperate’ but then they put handcuffs on them about what they can tell and actually share with us.”

Dissatisfaction with the administration on oversight matters goes beyond the intelligence panels. Last month, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, the top members of the Senate panel on homeland security, issued the administration its first congressional subpoenas over the Fort Hood shootings in Texas. Mr. Hoekstra argued that that case has documents — such as Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan’s e-mails — that the administration could share with lawmakers without jeopardizing the investigation.

“They’ve got enough information to convict Hasan and probably send him to jail for the rest of his life; he killed 13 Americans in front of what, 100 people,” Mr. Hoekstra said.

Barack Hussein Obama is not very “talkative” for the nucleus of a “transparent administration”, now, is he?

The only transparent things about his presidency are the “czars” he appointed ‘way back in every sector so that he’s got people on the scene who can go around Congress and deal directly with him and his moving the results of the U.S. Census into the white house so he and his cabal of convict material can manipulate demographic information to suit their political agendas.

“Don’t turn around, uh oh uh oh, der kommissar’s in town, uh oh uh oh…”

Since “the boss” is dedicated to keeping a watch on TSA (the Transportation Security Administration) and other security concerns and I’m minding the store, I’ve availed myself of some of the websites he left me that link to various security venues.

Hopefully, before someone else gets something right.

At any rate:

At least 16 people later linked to terror plots passed through U.S. airports undetected by federal officials who were on duty to spot suspicious behavior, according to a government report.

The airport-based officials were part of a federal behavior detection program designed to spot potential terrorists and others who pose a threat to aviation. The program, started in 2003, is one of 20 layers built into the nation’s aviation security system.

The Government Accountability Office questioned the scientific basis of the entire program in a report released Thursday. The program is dubbed SPOT - Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. It was instituted by the Transportation Security Administration “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying passengers in an airport environment,” the GAO said.

“A scientific consensus does not exist on whether behavior detection principles can be reliably used for counterterrorism purposes,” the congressional auditors said.
The public version of the GAO report did not include the names of the 16 terror suspects who eluded detection. But among the 16 who slipped past the behavior detection officials at Newark Liberty International Airport, the report said, was an individual who “in August 2008 later pleaded guilty to providing material support to al-Qaida.”

Both Najibullah Zazi, the Denver-area shuttle driver who led the plot to blow up the New York City subway system, and an accomplice, Zarein Ahmedzay, pleaded guilty to providing material support to al-Qaida. Federal investigators said both men also traveled through the Newark airport in August 2008.

“TSA has bungled the development and deployment of a potentially important layer of aviation security,” said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., who requested the report. Mica, the top Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called on the Obama administration to reorganize the TSA so it can better carry out its mission.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate the current deputy director of the FBI to lead the TSA. Two previous nominees dropped out after concerns were raised about their backgrounds.

Between May 2004 and August 2008, behavior detection officers who work for the TSA have made about 1,100 arrests, but none were for terrorism, the GAO said. TSA spokesman Greg Soule said behavior detection officers at Orlando International Airport spotted a person in April 2008 who was carrying components and instructions for a pipe bomb in his luggage.

Soule said the SPOT program “is designed to look for passengers displaying behaviors that indicate they are trying to avoid detection.”

The agency did not agree with all the GAO’s findings.

“TSA strongly believes that behavior detection is a vital layer in its aviation security strategy. … Leaders within the community of behavior detection researchers agree,” Jerald Levine, the director of the Homeland Security Department’s GAO liaison office, said in a response included in the report.

On the Third Time’s A Charm circuit, we may finally see TSA get a qualified whip, though there may be a few questions that require answers prior to confirmation.

The F.B.I.’s bio of the man who may soon be the new TSA Pistolero in town is here.

Hopefully, as I said, they’ll get it right before that someone else does.

That’s right, folks, none whatsoever.

What the heck’s Chuck talking about!?

Lemme ’splain: We already know that the Obama Administration and the nucleus of liberal Democrats that keeps Congress in line across there on the far left side of the aisle not only have no respect for the Constitution, they hold the great document in contempt!

We already know that the leftie “we” elected president in November 2008 not only has no respect, but also a whole lot of contempt for the concept of America as a world leader: He seems to believe we belong somewhere down there among the quagmire of socialism and failing economics that defines modern day Europe.

But…Obama also has no respect for the sovereignty of the United States of America. Of late, it seems everyone from communist China and Mexico has been welcomed by the left to weigh in on the United States’ internal issues.

On Thursday, Felipe Calderon, the president of Mexico, where prohibitive gun laws prevent good people from having firearms for protection against criminals and governments of dubious legitimacy (historically the norm in Mexico), encouraged Congress to reinstate the federal “assault weapon” ban. With a warning seemingly designed to appeal to those who believe that speaking out against the Obama Administration’s policies are one step short of sedition or worse, Calderon said, “[I]f you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the United States with access to the same power of weapons will not decide to challenge American authorities and civilians.”

Calderon also misinformed Congress, claiming that violence in Mexico rose significantly after the U.S. ban expired in 2004. In fact, Mexico’s murder rate has been stable since 2003 and remains well below rates recorded previously. However, he did not explain why violent crime has declined significantly in the U.S. since the ban expired, or how a ban on flash suppressors and bayonet mounts relates to drug thugs in Mexico or anywhere else.

Notwithstanding the Washington Post’s judgment that Calderon “made a powerful case,” we suspect his speech fell on mostly deaf ears in Congress and in Arizona, which he inappropriately criticized for having an illegal immigration enforcement law that is similar to Mexico’s. But it had some effect, however. New York Democrat Rep. Carolyn McCarthy issued a statement incorrectly claiming that she has repeatedly introduced legislation to “reinstate” the ban. She has repeatedly introduced legislation, of course, but not to reinstate the ban. Rather, her bills have proposed to apply the “assault weapon” label to far more firearms than were covered by the expired ban, including the M1 Garand service rifle, the ubiquitous Ruger 10/22, and any semi-automatic shotgun or rifle a future attorney general might claim is not “sporting.”

Since when is it that a corrupt piss ant leader of a corrupt shithole is accorded the privilege of advising us on what laws to enact, whether or not they are employing false datum in their arguments?

Since Obama!