Archive for April, 2008

Remember the Brit cameraman captured by terrorist militia in Iraq? Richard Butler who was kidnapped Feb. 10th, 2008 was interviewed on CBS Evening News and he made this comment:

PIZZEY: You took a lot of pictures in Afghanistan of people in the situation you were in, people hooded, their eyes taped, their hands tied up, kept in small cages. You must have had a lot of empathy from your situation with what you saw. Did you remember all that stuff?

BUTLER: Yes, I did it is quite ironic. I was very pleased that I wasn’t being kept in such harsh conditions that they were kept because I have seen them be put in stress positions for every waking hour, and at least they weren’t doing that to me. I had loose handcuffs, whereas they had plastic tie wraps that were very tight, and they were also taped round their mouth the whole time and hooded.

So yes, I was relieved that my captivity wasn’t as harsh as I have witnessed being applied to suspects taken from Afghanistan.

PIZZEY: You were saying it is better to be kidnapped by Shi’ites in southern Iraq than by Americans in Afghanistan.

BUTLER: I was pleased I wasn’t being waterboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an al Jazeera cameraman, for instance.

The full transcript is available at CBSNews.com: www.cbsnews.com

I’m sure this guy had no bias in his camera work. Guess he fits right into CBS’s anti-American agenda.

Technorati Tags: Richard Butler, CBS, anti-American agenda, Iraq

This Weeks Hero Was Suggested By Mary Ann

Wednesday Hero was started to put a face to the men and women of the American Armed Forces and what they do for us. Vary rarely has there been a member of a foreign military profiled. In fact, in the two years Wednesday Hero’s been going on it’s only been done once before. Here’s the second.

Lance Corporal Matt Croucher
24 years old from Birmingham, England
40 Commando Royal Marines

L/Cpl Matt Croucher is not only one of the bravest men alive, he’s also one of the luckiest men alive. On the morning of February 9, 2008 L/Cpl. and his unit were searching a compound near Sangin in Afghanistan that was suspected of being used to make bombs to be used in attacks on British and Afghan troops. Walking in the darkness among a group of four men, Croucher stepped into a tripwire that pulled the pin from a boobytrap grenade. His patrol commander, Corporal Adam Lesley, remembered Croucher shouting “Grenade!”

As others dived for cover, Croucher did something nobody expected. He lay down on the grenade to smother the blast. Lesley got on the ground, another man got behind a wall, but the last member of the patrol was still standing in the open when the grenade went off.

“My reaction was, ‘My God this can’t be real’,” said Lesley. “Croucher had simply lain back and used his day sack to blunt the force of the explosion. You would expect nine out of 10 people to die in that situation.” L/Cpl. Croucher was that 1/10. Not only did he survive, amazingly he only suffered shock from the blast and a bloody nose. He was saved by the special plating inside his Osprey body armor. The backpack he was wearing was thrown more than 30ft by the blast.

“I felt one of the lads giving me a top to toe check. My head was ringing. Blood was streaming from my nose. It took 30 seconds before I realized I was definitely not dead,” said L/Cpl. Croucher.

For his actions that day, L/Cpl. Croucher was in line for the Victoria Cross, the highest award for a British Serviceman, but it has yet to be awarded.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

Technorati Tags: LCpl Matt Croucher, Wednesday Hero, Suppport the Troops

Today, finally Barack Hussein Obama is outraged by the recent speeches given by his former paster of 20 years Jeremiah Wright. But his anger seems more to be directed at the point Wright made in referring to Obama’s previous comments on their church as “political posturing”. So, Obama went to this church every Sunday for 20 years and was defending Paster Wright and his church’s Black Liberation Theology.

Michelle Malkin has a great run down on Obama’s statement and comments from today’s press conference.

At the end of March/beginning of April I had posted some great articles by Anthony B. Bradley (assistant professor of theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, his PhD dissertation is titled “Victimology in Black Liberation Theology).

Here are the links to those postings:

What is Black Liberation Theology?

Victimology

Black Liberation is Marxist Liberation

I would encourage you to read what Bradley has to say about this supposed theology.

Michelle also live blogged the Wright’s National Press Club appearance, she’s got the video and links.

Technorati Tags: Barack Hussein Obama, Jeremiah Wright, Black Liberation Theology, Democrats, 2008 Election

After listening and reading about the latest exploits of Barack Hussein Obama’s friend, mentor, father-figure and former paster Jeremiah Wright the song “Freak Parade” by Big and Rich came to mind. Think about it, Obama has this troop of freaks and misfits for his mentors and friends.

Obama and Jeremiah Wright

Obama and Al Sharpton

Domestic Terrorist Weatherman Bill Ayers

Obama and Jessie Jackson

Tony Rezko – Obama’s corruption pal

Obama’s pal Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan

Technorati Tags: Barack Hussein Obama, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, Weatherman, Big and Rich, Freak Parade

From Herbert Meyer at American Thinker:

On May 13 about 70 percent of Iraq’s mobile telephone network will cease to operate. This will be a serious blow to the Iraqi economy. Moreover, a shutdown of Iraq’s mobile phone network – upon which our own people in Baghdad rely to communicate, by the way — will greatly diminish our intelligence gathering on al Qaeda in Iraq, thus de-railing our counter-insurgency strategy of relying on tips telephoned to us by Iraqis. And that will cost American lives.

Here’s what’s happening:

The primary mobile phone network in Iraq is operated by a Kuwaiti company called Zain Group. Zain also operates cell phone networks in other Mideast countries including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Sudan and Lebanon.

It takes about 1,300 cell towers to provide service in Iraq, and to protect these towers from being blown up by terrorists, or cannibalized by Iraqis working the black market, Zain signed a contract with an Iraqi-owned company called Babylon Eagles Security Company (BESC).

As the cell phone network in Iraq has grown during the past four years, BESC itself has grown to more than 7,000 heavily-armed and well-trained Iraqi security employees. The company has developed its own intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities, and maintains a complex set of working relationships with all the various tribes, militias, political parties and religious sects that live within its area of coverage.

snip….Zain and BESC are in the midst of a commercial dispute that’s heading for arbitration in London. This, by itself, is of no interest to the US.

However, according to BESC, Zain hasn’t paid BESC since December — about $12 million that’s owed — and since then all BESC employees have been receiving their salaries from BESC’s fast-dwindling cash reserves. That money runs out on May 13, and even now notice is being prepared for all BESC employees telling them that on that date they’re out of work.

Those 1,300 cell phone towers won’t survive a week.

I hope this disaster is averted since this could cost American Soldier casualties and injuries.

Read the rest….

Technorati Tags: Iraq, cell phone network, BESC, Zain, Def Sec Gates

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the push for H-1B visa expansion has nothing to do with a lack of American professionals and more to do with corporations driving down salaries with Bill Gates at Microsoft driving the lobbying efforts. Now we are being told it isn’t a lack of workers but a lack of innovation by Congressional supporters of the expansion. They are trying to tell us that Americans aren’t clever enough but foreign workers fulfill that need.

From the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

In pressuring Congress to expand the H-1B work visa and employment-based green card programs, industry lobbyists have recently adopted a new tack. Seeing that their past cries of a tech labor shortage are contradicted by stagnant or declining wages, their new buzzword is innovation. Building on their perennial assertion that the foreign workers are “the best and the brightest,� they now say that continued U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) hinges on our ability to import the world’s best engineers and scientists. Yet, this Backgrounder will present new data analysis showing that the vast majority of the foreign workers — including those at most major tech firms — are people of just ordinary talent, doing ordinary work. They are not the innovators the industry lobbyists portray them to be.

Norman Matloff at CIS developed theory to test that assertion that the best and brightest foreign workers would then be paid accordingly. He has called this the TM Value (Talent Measure):

We can thus easily determine whether a foreign worker is among “the best and the brightest� by computing the ratio of his salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. Let’s call this the Talent Measure (TM). Keep in mind that a TM value of 1.0 means that the worker is merely average, not of outstanding talent.

The analysis uses data from the Department of Labor’s Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM). Go to CIS for more details on his methodology.

Talent Measure Analysis

Again, I take as our Talent Measure (TM) the ratio of a worker’s salary to the prevailing wage claimed by the employer. The employer is legally required to pay at least the prevailing wage, and must state on the PERM application how that wage level was determined.3 Since the application will be rejected if the wage offered is below the prevailing wage, by definition all values of TM will be at least 1.0. The latter value means “the average worker,� i.e. of average talent, so if most workers have TM values close to 1.0, then most are probably not “the best and the brightest.�

With that it mind, let’s look at TM values, both overall and also for some specific occupations:

The trend, both general and for STEM occupations, is clear: Most TM values are only a little higher than 1.0, indicating that most of the foreign workers are not outstanding talents.

The sole exceptional occupation is mathematicians. Though rather few workers are in this category, the TM value is worth some comment. The anomaly is likely due to the recent interest in data mining, which has created a de facto two-tier wage structure among mathematicians, in which those who specialize in data mining are paid much more. Since the prevailing wage figures do not distinguish between these tiers, the official prevailing wage value set for mathematicians will be well below the market wage for data miners. Thus it is probable that even these foreign workers are not “the best and the brightest.�

Lobbyists for the big firms often claim that abuse of the H-1B program occurs mainly in Indian-owned “bodyshops� (firms that subcontract H-1Bs to larger companies), while by contrast the big firms are hiring “the best and the brightest.� Yet neither this scapegoating of the Indians nor the claim of hiring the top talents is warranted. Consider the TM values after disaggregation by firm:

Though these figures are slightly above the overall figures we saw earlier, they still show that the firms are not paying salaries indicating top talents.

Even Microsoft, on the high end of the companies shown here, is not paying top dollar, as seen by restricting attention to Microsoft’s workers holding the O-1 visa. As O-1 is specifically for, in the phrasing of the statute, “workers of extraordinary ability,� this gives us a measure of the salaries Microsoft pays to those foreign workers who in fact are “the best and the brightest.� The median TM for Microsoft O-1 workers is 1.404. That represents a salary premium of more than double what the firm is giving its foreign workers in general, so there does not appear to be much support for Microsoft’s claim that most of their H-1Bs are of extraordinary talent.

Thus again, it is readily apparent that even the most prominent tech firms, which are in the vanguard of the industry movement pressuring Congress to expand foreign worker programs, generally do not hire from “the best and the brightest� league.

There is additional data detailing PERM data relating to “outstanding” foreign talent along with the myths and truths. The lobbyists are using the myths primarily to lobby for an increase in the H-1b Visas.

The findings show:

# The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.

# The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.

# Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.

# Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that ‘Johnnie can’t do math’ in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

# Most foreign workers work at or near entry level, described by the Department of Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship. This counters the industry’s claim that they hire the workers as key innovators.

Other CAII News and Information:

Villaraigosa warns ICE to back off immigration raids from the Uncooperative Blogger

Nearly 300 Illegals Convicted of DUI in North Carolina from Virtuous Republic

The Washington Post: Promoting Illegal Immigration Daily and Twice On Sunday from Conservative Common Man

Guard the Border from Home from Virtuous Republic

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email brianbonner90-at-gmail-dot-com and let us know at what level you would like to participate.

Technorati Tags: H-1B Visas, Immigration, Illegal aliens, TM, Talent Measure, STEM, Center for Immigration Studies

From Freedom Folks

Our weekly vlog/poscast in illegal immigration and border security. In this weeks edition…

As our invaders warm up for next weeks amnesty march we thought we’d take a look at one of the darkest costs of modern immigration: slavery!

Mayday!

100% Preventable! Americans continue to pay the bloody price for open borders, when will the madness stop?

Download for your ipod here.

You can read the entire Mayday demands list here. (I know it’s hard to read on the screen, as you’ll see it’s quite lengthy!)

If you’d like to sponsor a show contact us here.

This has been the Blogs For Borders Video Blogburst. The Blogs For Borders Blogroll is dedicated to American sovereignty, border security and a sane immigration policy. If you’d like to join find out how right here.

Technorati Tags: illegal immigration, blogs 4 borders, blogs for borders, open borders, vlog, podcast, deportation, mexico, mayday, amnesty, murder, texas, florida, machete, media bias

Since the US refuses to exploit it’s own oil supplies we must rely on other countries. Recent oil discoveries in Brazil, Columbia, Peru and Mexico could shift the energy focus away from the Middle East to Latin America. Unfortunately, the Democrats recently blocked trade agreements with Columbia thus creating an adversarial relationship. Since the Democrats also block any efforts towards energy independence within the US our energy dependence is dependent on foreign sources.

IBD Editorials talks about the New World Order:

By 2020, the places that matter to the U.S. strategically may be entirely different than today. It’s not hard to project the possibilities.

Oil is being discovered in vast quantities in Brazil. Other gigantic deposits have been located in Mexico, Colombia and Peru. Colombia now shows oil reserves as high as Algeria’s. The U.S. imported 4.9 million barrels of oil a day in 2007. Absent development of U.S. reserves, the U.S. will need the new suppliers.

snip…High oil prices and tight supply create incentives to seek out new sources. Enter Brazil, Colombia and Peru, none of which were big players a few years ago. New technology to extract oil and natural gas from previously impossible sea depths or siphon it from laced rock formations brings those countries to the fore.

But the most pivotal factor in why oil’s future is south is that most of these new players have the political will to drill, something not seen in oil-producing nations dominated by green sensibilities, as the U.S. is, or by petrotyrants in Venezuela, Russia and Iran.

Colombia is now our ninth-largest oil supplier, and Brazil is our 11th largest. Both have moved sharply higher in the ranks of suppliers in the last few years. In 2007, Colombia supplied 50 million barrels of oil a day and Brazil supplied 61 million — small numbers compared with our biggest supplier, Canada, which sold the U.S. 680 million barrels a day last year. But the trend is up — and with the new discoveries, probably sharply so.

The Democrats have also been playing games with funding for Columbian military training recently so the efforts to establish Columbia as an ally will be especially trying with Democrats working against this alliance. I’m still trying to figure out where Democrats think our energy will come from to keep the US economy pumping.

Technorati Tags: energy, oil exploration, Democrats, Columbia, Latin America,

Here’s your chance. You can order a ticket to the 1st Annual Police Week Benefit Concert starring Mark Wills, Austin Cody hosted by Karri Turner (actress from J.A.G. tv show). When you order a ticket there is the option to “Donate to the Troops” and the USO will distribute these tickets to soldiers at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Details: Monday, May 12th
Meet and Greet: 7:00 PM
Doors: 7:30 PM
Showtime: 8:30 PM
Tickets: $35

*Tickets for this show may be donated to wounded troops. Just choose the “DONATE TO TROOPS” ticket type on your order. The USO will distribute these tickets to soldiers at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Go to www.thestatetheatre.com. Click on upcoming shows on the left sidebar. Scroll down to the Monday May 12 show starring Mark Wills and click on the tab to buy tickets!

Technorati Tags: Mark Wills, Austin Cody, Karri Turner, 1st Annual Police Week Benefit Concert, Falls Church VA, Walter Reed, Bethesda, Wounded Warriors

The last people who care about life or conservation are the global warming environMENTAL activists. The true agenda was disclosed at the United Nations earlier this week:

The Environmentalists’ Real Agenda

Ideologies: Once in a while the truth accidentally tumbles out on global warming activists’ real agenda. That’s exactly what happened at the U.N., when Bolivia’s leader called for ending capitalism to save the planet.

Delivering the keynote address at the United Nations forum on Indigenous People on Monday, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales told the adoring crowd that “if we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system.”

Morales elaborated on that by calling for an end to “unbridled industrial development, extraction of natural resources, excessive consumption of goods and accumulation of waste.”

More conveniently, he also demanded that trillions of dollars from the West be diverted to places like Bolivia, “to repair the earth.”

Seldom has the environmentalist agenda to end the capitalist system been laid out so plainly.

But in reality, it’s capitalism — combined with the framework that enables it to flourish, like rule of law and property rights — that has lifted billions of people out of poverty and improved the environment. Contrary to Morales’ assertions, the most capitalist countries are also the cleanest.

According to a 2006 study by the Heartland Institute, free enterprise does more to protect the environment than state intervention.

“The nations that have the best track records on environmental protection and improvement are those with the highest amount of free-market capitalism,” wrote Samuel Aldrich and Jay Lehr, in “Free Enterprise Protects the Environment.”

Morales is a Marxist, so the environmental records of the communist and socialist systems he touts to save the earth are instructive.

After communism fell in Eastern Europe, some of the biggest revelations were about how vast the pollution was in countries where no one was permitted to own or care for land.

Getting rid of capitalism created the black rivers of China, filled Eastern Europe’s skies with unfiltered coal and diesel exhaust, brought deforestation that’s led to sandstorms in China, spilled oil that destroyed Siberian lakes, and poisoned land with mercury and nickel waste in large swaths of Eastern Europe and Cuba.

It also brought the still-dead nuclear devastation of Chernobyl. Diverse as these regions are, the lack of capitalism means there was no accountability or incentives to save the earth.

And, sadly, it’s still that way now. According to the Blacksmith Institute, the 10 most polluted places on earth are in Azerbaijan, China, India, Peru, Russia, Ukraine and Zambia, all of which have long histories of communism, socialism or nationalist isolation, the very alternatives Morales proposes to replace capitalism.

Morales’ attack on capitalism represents the real agenda for the radical environmentalists. They seek global governance and an end to private property, an unsalable concept given the record of communist countries. So they’re marketing it under a new brand name, wrapped in the greener concept of “saving the earth.”

Milking the West’s fascination for the exotic, Morales has the game down flat. “We feel that we have the ethical and moral right to talk about these things as indigenous peoples because we have historically lived in harmony with Mother Earth,” he said. “It is indigenous peoples who have defended this Mother Earth, Planet Earth.”

For that, he’s feted in the radical-chic circles of Manhattan as an indigenous font of truth — a real Aymara Indian from Bolivia and thus, wiser about conserving the planet than us ordinary mortals.

The patronizing attitude is obvious in statements like U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s:

“Indigenous peoples live in many of the world’s most biologically diverse areas. As custodians of these lands, they have accumulated deep, firsthand knowledge about the impacts of environmental degradation, including climate change. They know the economic and social consequences, and they can and should play a role in the global response.”

What’s really going on with the people Ban extols is something else: “Too often their real agenda is power — power to remake the economic and social systems to suit their own command and control goals, not to serve the public good as they so loudly proclaim,” Aldrich and Lehr wrote.

Romanticization of nature to promote state control hasn’t had it this good since the days of Rousseau’s noble savage. The only problem for environmental radicals, of course, is that sometimes the designated “savages” accidentally reveal the truth.

It is about power and money. Al Gore cares only about Al Gore and his pockets. The United Nations is no different. Nor is the drive by Media or the Hollywood elite any different, they are all Marxists who want control or power and the way to attain that is to remove self determination through capitalism from the “little people”.

Technorati Tags: environMENTALists, Globull Warming, Climate Change, Evo Morales, Bolivia, United Nations, junk science, marxists, communists