Dismissing Concerns About Syrian Surge into US; Obama Doubles Down; Opens Doors Wider
Posted: August 5, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Global, Health and Social Issues, Terrorism, War Room, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Federal government of the United States, Homeland Security, Iran, James Comey, Jeh Johnson, Jihadism, National security, Refugee, Syria, United States Department of State Leave a comment
State Department reports show that 2,340 Syrian refugees arrived last month in the United States. That’s more than what occurred during the entire seven months after President Obama directed his team to prepare for 10,000 admissions from the war-torn country.
The pace of Syrian refugees entering the U.S. has surged in recent weeks, government figures show, putting the Obama administration on track to meet its target of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees before the end of September -– and reviving Republican concerns about the security implications.
State Department reports show that 2,340 Syrian refugees arrived last month in the United States.
That’s more than what occurred during the entire seven months after President Obama directed his team to prepare for 10,000 admissions from the war-torn country. Total admissions for the current budget year, which ends Sept. 30, now come to about 7,900, and the vast majority of them are Sunni Muslims, records show.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said earlier this week the U.S. is on track to meet the 10,000-refugee goal.
If the pace from June and July continues this month, the target should be reached with a couple of weeks to spare, before Obama heads to the United Nations to urge world leaders to admit more refugees and increase funding for relief organizations.
But amid new predictions from FBI Director James Comey of a “terrorist diaspora out of Syria,” some Republicans are ramping up warnings that the flow of refugees poses a threat to America and Western Europe. Read the rest of this entry »
Gallup: Confidence in Government’s Handling of Terror Hits All Time Low
Posted: December 11, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Terrorism, War Room, White House | Tags: Ace of Spades HQ, Barack Obama, Buxton, Cato Institute, Colin Powell, Homeland Security, Jihadism, North Carolina, Pentagon, U.S. Department of State, United States, Watcher (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Leave a comment
Rasmussen: Belief that Terrorists are Winning the War Hits All Time High
Source: Ace of Spades HQ
EXCLUSIVE: TOP SECRET Photo of Syria’s State-of-the-Art Terror Database
Posted: November 21, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Global, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Background check, Barack Obama, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Islamism, Jihadism, Migrant, Refugee, Syria, Terror Database 1 Comment
Cheap Shots: Jewish-Owned D.C. Business Targeted by Self-Described ISIS Militants
Posted: January 14, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, War Room | Tags: American Jewish Committee, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Business, Homeland Security, Jews, Mass murder, Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, Paris, WJLA-TV 1 CommentWASHINGTON (WJLA) — A thriving D.C. business is the target of self-described ISIS militants.
For the past five months a barrage of phone calls and internet postings have threatened 
employees. The callers vow to carry out mass murder.
ABC7 News is not identifying the business nor any individuals because of the sensitive nature of these threats.
The business is Jewish owned and some of the threats are anti-Semitic while others are racial or homophobic.
The recent terrorist attacks in Paris have employees worried. Read the rest of this entry »
America’s New Security State
Posted: May 15, 2014 Filed under: Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: American Civil War, George Orwell, George Washington, Homeland Security, Iran, Muslim, Ruling class, Saudi Arabia, Woodrow Wilson 4 Comments
Salus populi suprema lex: In the name of the people’s safety, the dictator’s will is law.
This essay is an excerpt from Angelo Codevillo’s new book (Hoover Press).
Angelo M. Codevilla writes: The loss of peace abroad has upset the balance between the various elements of life in America, fed domestic strife, and resulted in the loss of peace at home. The need for protection against foreign jihadists and their American imitators occasioned the empowerment of a vast apparatus of “homeland security” that treats all Americans as potential enemies—with only a pretense of even-handedness. In fact, the sense that enemies among us must be dealt with reinforced our bipartisan ruling class’s tendency to regard its own domestic political opponents as another set of persons whose backward ways must be guarded against and reformed. A spiral of strife among Americans resulted. In the light of history and of reason, any other outcome would have been surprising.
[Angelo M. Codevilla‘s book: To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations is available at Amazon.com]
After 9/11 our ruling class came together on the proposition that, at home as well as abroad, America is at war against enemies so evil that there must be no limit to fighting them, whose identity we must always seek but can never know; that to focus on, to “profile,” the kinds of persons who have committed terrorist acts, is racist and provocative; that any American is as likely as any other to be a terrorist, and hence that all must submit to being sifted, screened, restricted—forever. Childhood in the “land of the free, the home of the brave” must now include learning to spread-eagle and be still as government employees run their hands over you. Patriotism is now supposed to mean obeisance to the security establishment, accepting that the authorities may impose martial law on whole cities, keep track of all phone calls, or take whatever action they choose against any person for the sake of “homeland security,” and that theirs alone is the choice whether to disclose the basis for whatever they do. Read the rest of this entry »
Experts: Civilians Not Ready for EMP-Caused Blackout
Posted: April 21, 2014 Filed under: Science & Technology, U.S. News, War Room | Tags: Electrical grid, Electromagnetic pulse, EMP, Homeland Security, Peter Vincent Pry, United States, Watchdog.org, William R. Forstchen Leave a comment
For Watchdog.org, Josh Peterson writes: The catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse-caused blackout could be preventable, but experts warn the civilian world is still not ready.
Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, said the technology to avoid disaster from electromagnetic pulses exists, and upgrading the nation’s electrical grid is financially viable.
“The problem is not the technology,” Pry said. “We know how to protect against it. It’s not the money, it doesn’t cost that much. The problem is the politics. It always seems to be the politics that gets in the way.”
IT’S STOPPABLE: Peter Vincent Pry says technology exists to protect against the damage from electromagnetic pulses.
He said the more officials plan, the lower the estimated cost gets.
“If you do a smart plan — the Congressional EMP Commission estimated that you could protect the whole country for about $2 billion,” Pry told Watchdog.org. “That’s what we give away in foreign aid to Pakistan every year.”
In the first few minutes of an EMP, nearly half a million people would die. That’s the worst-case scenario that author William R. Forstchen estimated in 2011 would be the result of an EMP on the electric grid — whether by an act of God, or a nuclear missile detonating in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of electromagnetic energy strong enough to disable, and even destroy, nearby electronic devices.
The scenario sounds like something in a Hollywood film, but the U.S. military has been preparing its electronic systems for such an event since the Cold War. The protective measures taken to harden facilities against a nuclear attack also help in some cases to protect against EMPs.
The civilian world is another story. Read the rest of this entry »
We are not the people we used to be
Posted: April 12, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Average Joe, Bogart, Casablanca, Homeland Security, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Maltese Falcon, United States Leave a commentIt’s my pleasure to hijack a great item by Robert Ferrigno, and reintroduce readers to his blog. The wonders of YouTube — I was fortunate to find this very scene from KING OF THE UNDERWORLD –and include it, so we can watch for ourselves.
Popular culture, which is all about eyeballs and asses in seats, is more reliable than any survey to determine who we are at this moment. A glimpse at a shard of popular culture from the past is a snapshot of who we were at that moment. Sometimes, the disparity isn’t pretty. I was flipping through the channels at 4 a.m. yesterday, putting off getting to work, when I saw a very young Humphrey Bogart on Turner Classics. Had to stop.
The movie was KING OF THE UNDERWORLD, 1939. Bogart was a bank robber, natch, smooth and deadly, his grin like a poisonous flower beaming across the decades. He and his crew drive into a small town in Anyplace, USA, stroll into the Sheriff’s office, where the man with the badge is blathering with his sidekick about maybe they should put up a speed trap of something, bring a little revenue into God’s country. Next thing you know, Bogart’s gang show their pistols, take the sheriff’s keys and free their gang buddies from the jail. As Bogart and his men stroll out the door, the sheriff pushes a secret button on the floor, starting a siren blaring in this sleepy town.
What happens next knocked me out.
As the townspeople hear the siren, they rush TOWARDS the sheriff’s office. They don’t flee. They don’t duck and cover. They don’t wait for some alphabet agency to come and handle the problem, string out the yellow crime scene tape, maybe distribute bundt cakes and counseling afterwards. No, the call goes out that there’s trouble. One of the townspeople, who is Mr. Average Joe, calls out, “Get yer guns!” and the crowd scatters to homes and storefront where they get their guns and start blasting away at Bogart and his men as they flee. Bogart gets nicked in the arm, which sets off a chain of events which, by the end of the movie, leaves the bad guys dead or on their way to prison.
It made me realize how different we are now. King of the Underworld was a B-movie when it was made, a quickie ground out in two months. No one thought it was art or social commentary or anything but 90 minutes of excitement and diversion, but there was something in that man shouting “Get yer guns!” that must have seemed natural at the time it was made. An instinctive response to evil. Collective action by free people. If it wasn’t a commonplace reaction at the time, it at least seemed like something the best of us should do.
Today a screwhead goes nuts, murders innocents and the response is let’s make it harder for people to defend themselves. Homeland Security comes out with the recommendation that when faced with an armed gunman, we should run, hide or throw something at him. Evidently that something not including .357 hollow points. The message is, “stay calm, you poor, dumb bastards, the authorities will be on their way shortly to carry away the dead and parade the victim’s families to the cameras until there’s no more political gain or TV ratings to be squeezed out of their grief.
We are not the people we used to be.
via Roberts Blog
“Looks like a jailbreak. Let’s get our guns!”
3 Reasons to Kill the Dept. of Homeland Security
Posted: November 23, 2012 Filed under: Mediasphere, War Room | Tags: Department of Homeland Security, General Services Administration, George W. Bush, Government Accountability Office, Homeland Security, September 11 attacks, Transportation Security Administration, United States Department of Homeland Security Leave a commentIts unnecessary, ineffective, and expensive. And thats just for starters.
1. It’s unnecessary. In the months immediately following September 11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush initially resisted calls to create a new high-level bureaucracy that would be laid on top of current activities. He was right to recognize that coordinating existing agencies would have been smarter and better. Unfortunately, he caved in to pressure to create a massive new department.
2. It’s ineffective. To read the titles of Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyses of Homeland Security is to be reminded constantly that DHS is never quite on top of its game. Recent reports include “DHS Requires More Disciplined Investment Management to Help Meet Mission Needs,” “DHS Needs Better Project Information and Coordination Among Four Overlapping Grant Programs,” and “Agriculture Inspection Program Has Made Some Improvements, But Management Challenges Persist.”
3. It’s expensive. Last year, Homeland Security spent a whopping $60 billion, a figure that will doubtlessly increase in coming years. The construction of its new headquarters – the single-largest projectever undertaken by The General Services Administration – will cost at least $4 billion and is already years behind on schedule since breaking ground in 2009.
Since it’s the holiday season, here’s a bonus reason to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: It also runs the Transportation Security Administration, whose nasty reputation for manhandling innocent travelers is only slightly more annoying than its massive and undeserved growth in personnel and cost over the past decade.
via Reason.com
pundit from another planet 