Brian Terry’s birthday. If he had not been cut down by bullets provided to a Mexican drug cartel by his own government, Agent Brian Terry would have celebrated his forty-third year on the planet this past Sunday. Unlike the members of this administration and its Justice Department, he exemplified honor and faithfulness to the values upon which this nation was founded. One way of reciprocating the honor he showed his fellow citizens is by continuing to hold our government to account for the misdeeds which led to Agent Terry’s death. 

Although commemorating his life and honoring his name are both commendable, the best tribute to his life and work would be to continue it in his name. You can start by going to the website of the Brian Terry Foundation, an exemplary organization dedicated to ensuring that Agent Terry’s death will not be in vain. 

That’s the question Congress is trying to get to the bottom of. The testimony above comes from the Benghazi hearings. The media coverage of the hearings, like that of the jihadist assault that precipitated them, has been less than illuminating. Stay tuned for further developments…

No good deed goes unpunished, as those who blew the whistle on the Obama administration’s gun-walking debacle can tell you firsthand. Intimidation and obstruction is the norm, and honesty about criminal abuses by the feds is discouraged at all costs. Vince Cefalu is one of several former agents who’ve been punished for daring to question the illegal commands of their politically-appointed superiors. Those who aided and abetted the malfeasance of the executive branch, on the other hand, were handsomely rewarded by the federal bureaucracy. I urge you to watch the entire interview! This is our government at work.

Update: It’s believed by the FBI that the death of this Border Patrol agent was a case of friendly fire. Look for a link to the USA Today article in the comments section of this post. 

Yet another deadly attack upon this nation’s Border Patrol agents, the first since the ambush of Brian Terry by Mexican drug cartels, goes largely unnoticed by the White House. Just as this administration ignored the pleas of Agent Terry’s family for honesty and transparency, so too does it evade troublesome questions raised by Univision’s blockbuster investigative journalism related to the ongoing Fast and Furious carnage.  

Was Patrol Agent Nicholas J. Ivie’s murdered by one of the weapons trafficked in the Fast and Furious Operation? House Republicans think so, and based upon past events, I would have to agree.

The appointment of Cheryl Saban as Ambassador to the United Nations merely raises more questions about an administration that has been hell bent on obstructing any and all investigations into President Obama’s blood-soaked Watergate.

Will this latest attack upon our nation’s front-line defenders force the White house to finally come clean, or stop the retribution exacted from federal whistleblowers? If past is prologue, it probably won’t, which is why we can be grateful that some people in the media are finally paying attention.

Despite the theatrical exodus of its most useless faction of lawmakers, Congress coalesced into a bipartisan coalition this week to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for his obstruction of investigations into the Fast and Furious debacle. Here’s the roll call for the contempt vote. Kudos to the seventeen Democrats-including New York’s own Kathy Hochul and Bill Owens-who broke with their party in order to hold the head of the Department of Justice accountable for his malfeasance in office. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, also deserves commendation for introducing into the public record evidence from a March 2010 wiretap application which belies Eric Holder’s repeated protestations of ignorance regarding gunwalking south of the border. 

Hopefully, this momentous vote means Congress will continue its oversight of a rogue administration that seems incapable of policing itself. 

Here’s the link to the full hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which resulted in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt. Kudos to Chairman Issa and the twenty-two other Republicans-including Syracuse’s own Ann Marie Buerkle-who had the gumption to hold this administration to account for its obstruction of congressional investigations into what is potentially the most consequential presidential scandal since Watergate. It’s good to know that at least a few of our elected officials are doing the jobs for which they are paid out of our tax dollars.

With Senator John Cornyn now calling upon Eric Holder to resign, and a contempt citation in the offing, the chorus of voices demanding accountability from Barack Obama’s Department of Justice seems to have reached a critical mass. At the very least,  it has caused the current Attorney General to yield to Chairman Darrell Issa in at least one bureaucratic skirmish, although as the American Thinker points out, this  gambit might very well be simply another move in an orchestrated campaign of obstruction of justice on the part of the current administration. 

Another reason for the illusory cooperation on the part of Mr. Holder might be the willingness of Justice Department employees to come forward as whistleblowers and refute the falsehood that gunwalking was not linked to the disastrous Fast and Furious operation which resulted in so many deaths, including that of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.  We can only hope that these truth-tellers fare better than Vince Cefalu, a career ATF agent who was fired once he publicly voiced criticism of Project Gunrunner. 

Whatever comes of the latest confrontation between Congress and a recalcitrant Department of Justice, one thing that is certain is that this administration will not looking be for guidance in the Constitution. After all, as even its liberal supporters acknowledge, President Obama does not like following the law. Bully for us!

This month’s Rattle brings us a host of stories that the mainstream media didn’t cover sufficiently-preferring instead to shower accolades upon the man responsible for abandoning immigration enforcement in the name of political opportunism. We’ll cover everything from the latest spate of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens to Barack Obama’s continued roll out of administrative amnesty, which now includes directives to ignore both interior enforcement and border security.

But first, we’ll examine this administration’s ongoing obstruction of Congress’s investigation into the ever-broadening gun-walking scandals. Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars-whose coverage of Fast and Furious is non pareil-we learn that the White House is blocking testimony from Kevin O’Reilly, a former staff member of the National Security Council who wants to speak with the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This administration’s invocation of executive privilege is just the latest example of obstruction of justice  relating to Fast and Furious.

It should be recalled that last July the acting head of the ATF told Congress that his agency was paying FBI agents to ignore the law in pursuit of this administration’s bizarre and opaque political goals. Immigration control, not gun control, is a solution that Barack Obama’s Justice Department dismisses out of hand. We can only hope that, as Katie Pavlich reports in Town Hall, Chairman Darrell Issa pursues this investigation to its conclusion, which hopefully will result in a more than a few stiff prison sentences. Speaking of Katie Pavlich, she has a fantastic new book about Fast and Furious entitled-appropriately-Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal, which I urge you all to read.

Obfuscation and evasion are hallmarks of this administration, especially as it pertains to immigration and border security, as an insightful commentary from Michael Cutler published by Fox News Latino illustrates. The former INS agent and current immigration watchdog points out that Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security is effectively “cooking the books” by relying solely upon  documented arrests-a misleading statistic-in order to pretend that this administration is cracking down upon illegal entry into the United States. FAIR’s Legislative Update further dissects this policy, which is drawing increasing scrutiny from Congress-particularly Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz- notwithstanding what Tom Tancredo accurately describes as a bipartisan conspiracy to hobble border security and immigration enforcement. By not logging and tracking the number of illegal border crossers who were not detained, Customs and Border Protection is painting a rosy picture of a much more dire situation.

The deceit of this administration extends beyond the CBP and encompasses virtually every aspect of immigration enforcement, both at the border and inside of the United States. Even though ICE is touting the Cross Check raids it initiated earlier this month-intended to apprehend ostensibly violent criminals, absconders and  fugitives from justice-this is merely a political expedient designed for election year consumption. The truth is that Barack Obama’s administrative amnesty proceeds apace, with four cities ordered to halt deportations, according to the Dan Stein Report. Remarkably, the Executive Office for Immigration Review has closed San Francisco’s immigration court and plans to completely halt its proceedings for the entire summer. Jim Kouri reports on yet another component of Barack Obama’s administrative amnesty, the decision to suspend deportations of illegal aliens with “families,” inside of the United States.

And while illegal aliens are not being deported, they will be able to enjoy state-of-the-art detention facilities, including some new amenities such as beach volleyball and cable TV. Lamar Smith excoriates this administration for its skewed priorities in a must-read op-ed published in The Hill. Although this new detention manual  might seem farcical, it’s far from a laughing matter. As Jim Kouri points out in his Examiner column, the Department of Homeland Security has taken virtually no action against foreigners who overstay their visas. This negligence persists over a decade after the September 11th massacres, which were committed by a cadre of jihadists whose visa applications are symptomatic of our country’s dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy. This is not merely an hypothetical problem, even after the destruction of the World Trade Center, as the case of illegal alien Amine El Khalifi demonstrates. The fact that this indifference to the lives of American citizens continues unabated, despite repeated pressure exerted by the GAO serves to illustrate this administration’s fundamental lack of accountability.

Even as it lags behind in locating and detaining criminal aliens, the administration of Barack Obama has deigned to grant Temporary Protected Status to thousands of Syrians living in the United States. As we’ve pointed out in the past, Temporary Protected Status is anything but temporary. In fact, it is merely another expedient used to grant de facto amnesty to a group of illegal aliens who can prove “hardship” circumstances, most of which persist indefinitely-making their stay in the United States permanent. This is even more disturbing when juxtaposed against the State Department’s recent decision to bar inspection of a visiting Egyptian delegation consisting of Muslim Brotherhood officials. Of course, Egypt isn’t the only country where the Ikwhan has a strong foothold.

The problem is that Barack Obama’s ostensible opposition, i.e. congressional Republicans, are doing virtually nothing to investigate the egregious overreach of his administration on immigration matters. Quite the contrary, some are hard at work developing proposals that would only worsen the situation, such as DREAM Lite, in hopes of  cultivating the ever-elusive Hispanic vote. Republican leaders in the states are not faring much better in this regard, as the difficult struggle in New Hampshire to prevent illegal aliens from capitalizing upon in-state tuition benefits demonstrates.

In an update to a story that we’ve covered recently, the North Carolina General Assembly held another hearing on illegal immigration and potential enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, according to NC Listen, it was dominated by illegal aliens and their supporters in the legislature, including some of the very people who had disrupted a previous hearing about these problems. Heading further south, we learn that the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act has been killed in the Mississippi State Senate. Apparently, Judiciary Chairman Hob Bryan has caved knuckled under to the Mississippi Poultry Association and its desire for cheap labor, notwithstanding the harm such a decision may inflict on innocent Mississippians. Its neighbor to the East, Alabama, has revisited HB 56, the landmark legislation that targeted illegal aliens living in that state. Rep. Micky Hammon has decided to alter some of the provisions that have been enjoined by a federal court, but maintains that he and his fellow Republicans will not repeal the law, which is welcome news.

In not so good news, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has decided to defy Immigration and Customs Enforcement and refuse detainer requests for criminal aliens housed in her county’s jails. Saul Chavez is one beneficiary of Preckwinkle’s benevolence, having fled the country upon being released from jail after killing William McCann. The carnage our government’s policies wreak is not limited to the odd vehicular manslaughter though, as the massacre at Oikos University in California makes clear to any impartial observer. Limits to Growth has an insightful story about mass-murderer One L. Goh which explains the circumstances surrounding his rampage which the main stream media willfully ignores. Oikos was apparently more concerned with harvesting tuition payments by foreign students-often with loans backed by American taxpayers-than ensuring the safety of its student body. It brings to mind  9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose entrance to the United States was facilitated by a campus administration eager to recruit students from the Middle East, heedless of the potentially deadly repercussions.

The fact that there are visa mills exploiting the F-1 Visa program should come as no surprise to people who are aware of the extensive fraud and exploitation present in the legal immigration system. Just as in Canada-which recently charged attorney Sandra Zaher with inventing false refugee claims-the United States is plagued by immigration fraud so pervasive that the conviction of Earl Seth David, aka Rabbi Avraham David, head of a New York law firm, headlines an ICE press release. The irony of an agency headed by John Morton-who’s tasked with expediting illegal immigration-spotlighting the conviction of someone for immigration fraud is apparently lost on this administration.

In another prime example of abuse, a lawsuit by two former employees of Larsen & Toubro InfoTech Limited Inc alleges systemic fraud at the India-based IT firm for which they once worked. Joining an earlier class action filed against the firm, this suit asserts that the plaintiff was forced to not only forge documents related to H-1B visas-a program rampant with corruption and fraud-but told not to report the crime to outside authorities. Read the sickening story for yourself, if you feel you have the requisite stomach. The baffling purposes of the H1-B visa program weren’t illuminated by a recent decision by Judge Gregory Frost, who ordered suppressed almost all information related to the case of  Geza Rakoczi, who is described thusly,

…a young alien man with a mysterious legal status, probably an illegal alien, who has a bachelor’s degree from a marginal educational institution, a private one that accepts all applicants, and his employer, a mortgage finance company in trouble in two different states.

Putting the lie to the idea that these visas are reserved for “highly-skilled” immigrants. More often than not they are merely convenient bodies used to replace the more demanding, highly-compensated Americans who they’ve made redundant. If you don’t believe me, just ask the wife of unemployed semiconducter engineer Darin Wedel, who is still waiting to hear back from President Obama. But do not fear, the virtual border fence is back on track,which I suppose is small comfort to the thousands of hard-working Americans like Mr. Wedel.  However, India is not the only nation to take advantage of the nebulous, easily exploitable H1-B visa program. As Phyllis Schlafly  points out, the Islamist Gulen movement in Turkey has used these same visas in order to indoctrinate Muslim students in American charter schools. The dangers posed by the Gulen movement have been explored ad nauseam in other forums, but it should be noted that even if you ascribe the most benign of intentions to the Gullenists, the idea that fundamentalist Muslim teachers are somehow highly skilled workers is implausible on its face.  Focusing on yet another rising Asian power, the New American has an interesting story about the PRC’s use of the EB-5 immigrant investor visa program in the state of Idaho which is well worth reading.

Returning to more timely issues, we discovered this past week that it’s not all that difficult to register to vote using a fabricated identity, or even assuming the persona of the current Attorney General  of the United States. Thanks to James O’Keefe we’ve discovered how simple it is to game the system, although officials at the increasingly misnamed Justice Department don’t seem to agree. Of course, acknowledging that vote fraud exists would require the Obama administration to prosecute those responsible for it, which wouldn’t bode well for the electoral prospects of Barack Obama’s party. From New York to Florida, from Indiana to Arizona, stealing elections has become quite commonplace, even as the White House-and its complaisant cronies in the media-scoff at the notion. Some Democrats, though, readily admit that trying to manipulate the outcome of elections is a routine practice, and a few even have the integrity to support measures that would rectify this betrayal of democracy.

In an ironic twist, labor unions-which were some of the most vehement supporters of President Obama’s Stimulus plan-are now complaining about some of the jobs stemming from stimulus projects going to Korean workers. I suppose the lesson is to be careful what you wish for, especially if it is over 700 billion dollars worth of taxpayer-financed boondoggles.

In more border violence, two illegal immigrants were murdered just northwest of Tucson on Thursday by two camouflaged gunman, echoing an attack that occurred  near the same city in 2007. This sort of bloodshed is rare but not unheard of in Arizona, especially in the Tucson sector, where over forty percent of this nation’s  illegal aliens come through. It is yet another reason why the constitutionality of SB 1070 must be upheld by the Supreme Court, in spite of the hostility of open borders dogmatists such as the misleadingly named Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Our final story is related to our relationship to the state as individuals, and how that relationship is changing as a result of our government’s decades-long recalibration of this country’s demographics. Courtesy of the Pew Hispanic Center, we now know that over seventy percent of Latinos want the government to provide more services to Americans, not less. Limits to Growth has a fascinating summary of the survey’s other findings, which include a belief among Hispanics that they should learn English in order to succeed in the United States, but not in order to integrate into the broader society. The findings about faith in government are worth exploring though, because they reinforce something that our side has been saying for a very long time. Namely, that Hispanic voters’ support for Democrats and generally left wing political candidates has very little to do with the GOP’s position on immigration, but a lot to do with their endorsement of redistributive economic policies.

The findings of the Pew Hispanic Center demonstrate that the cause and effect most often cited in declining Republican Party affiliation among Hispanics-embodied by the specious narrative about Pete Wilson and the waning fortunes of the California GOP-is reversed. Hispanics do not support the Democratic Party because it advocates open borders, the Democratic Party supports open borders because it enhances its ability to win future elections. In effect, what is happening is that the political elite is electing a new people. This dynamic needs to be remembered whenever we hear mealy-mouthed Republicans exhorting us to abandon any attempt to impose reason upon an anachronistic immigration system that is designed to thwart the wishes of the vast majority of the American public.

It’s going to be a long, tumultuous election year.

Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Darrell Issa is, meanwhile, threatening to hold Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to disclose important documents related to the Fast and Furious coverup.That is why I’m urging you all to sign a petition started by an invaluable grassroots political organization called Grassfire.org, which calls for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder. We need to make it clear that the deaths of courageous law enforcement officials, to say nothing of the scores of Mexicans who’ve lost their lives due to administration incompetence and/or malfeasance, are not in vain, and will not go unpunished. Eric Holder, as well as any administration official culpable in Fast and Furious and obstruction of investigative probes related to Fast and Furious, need to be held to account by the American people.