Leading anti-immigrant activist admitted that NAFTA increased illegal crossings from Mexico but supports free trade anyway

The massive growth in immigration pressures from Mexico in the 1990s was not a failure of NAFTA, but an inevitable consequence. The way we’ll know that CAFTA is promoting economic development in Central America and the Dominican Republic (the scope of the treaty) will be when we see the same increase in immigration pressures. Counterintuitive as it might seem, economic development, especially agricultural modernization, always sets people on the move, by consolidating small farms into larger, more productive operations. These excess farmers then move to cities, where they get manufacturing or service-sector jobs.

But the fact that development cuts peasants loose from the land and compels them to move to cities doesn’t tell us whose cities they’re moving to. Immigration pressure, after all, is not the same as actual immigration. The problem with NAFTA was not that it promoted trade between the United States and Mexico but that neither country did anything meaningful to make sure that the excess Mexican peasantry moved to Mexico’s cities instead of ours. And CAFTA might actually create proportionately greater immigration pressures, because most of the agreement’s impact will be to make our exports more competitive there, with some 80 percent of imports from the CAFTA countries already entering our country duty-free.
[…]
If there is one lesson to be learned from NAFTA it is that free-trade agreements must be accompanied by muscular immigration controls, especially if they are reached with countries that are nearby or already send a lot of immigrants here. If the …

Cold War alliances and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), pp. 147-149:

In the 1970s, guided by Kamal Adham, Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. The United States, accustomed to working with Saudi Arabia, was untroubled by the rise of Islamism in Egypt. In fact, Washington was so eager to bring Egypt over the US side in the Cold War that policy makers, diplomats, and intelligence officers viewed Sadat’s restoration of the Islamic right benignly or tacitly encouraged it.
[…]
Concurrent with the growth of the Islamic right in Egypt, Sadat helped engineer a dramatic expansion of America’s power in the Middle East. Under Nasser, Egypt was a nation at odds with the United States. Twenty thousand Soviet troops, technicians, and advisers backed Egypt’s armed force; a war of attrition was under way along the Egypt-Israel border; and Egypt and the United States lacked even normal diplomatic ties. But Sadat established a covert relationship with Adham, the CIA, and Henry Kissinger, the US national security adviser. In 1971, within a year of assuming control, Sadat ousted the Egyptian left from the government, and in 1972 he stunned Moscow by expelling Soviet forces. After the 1973 Ramadan War–waged in concert with Saudi Arabia and organized around Islamic themes rather than Arab nationalism–Egypt and the United States reestablished ties. […] By 1980, Egypt was America’s leading Arab ally, engaged in supporting the US jihad in Afghanistan and …

Israeli settlements and the “negotiating table” panacea

US State Department Press Briefing with Deputy Spokesman Mark C. Toner (bolding mine):

QUESTION: The Israeli Government has announced plans to actually encourage settlers to move into the West Bank and to begin – and also to begin a process that would – that could end up in legalizing what are now illegal outposts. I’m assuming that your position on both of these things hasn’t changed, so I’m wondering –

MR. TONER: You assume correctly.

QUESTION: Yeah.

MR. TONER: You know we’ve said multiple times –

QUESTION: What is it – can you maybe make it a little bit more clear, because it seems to be apparent that the Israelis, or at least Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, don’t understand exactly what it is that you, as their prime benefactor and large – huge ally, want from them.

MR. TONER: Well, Matt, we’ve said this many times from this podium and from elsewhere that we view any move that would jeopardize getting these two parties back to the negotiating table, and indeed, we’ve obviously seen them back – face-to-face negotiations over the past couple of weeks – that we find those unconstructive and unhelpful.

QUESTION: And that would include what they have announced today?

MR. TONER: Yes, that would include that.

QUESTION: All right. So what is the consequence, then, for Israel for them continuing to defy – not only defy but really to do – not just to say no, we don’t agree with that, but then to actually actively …

WikiLeaks cable: Gingrich wanted a global environmental treaty organization in 2005

Apparently Newt Gingrich has been fear-mongering about UN Agenda 21 these days:

It’s a United Nations proposal to create a series of centralized planning provisions, where all of a sudden your local city government can’t do something because of some agreement they signed with some private group who are all committed basically to taking control of your private property and turning it into a publically controlled property. Everywhere I go in the country today, people, particularly the tea parties, are very worried about Agenda 21. It’s part of a general problem of United Nations and other international bureaucracies that are seeking to maintain an extra-constitutional control over us, and I reject that model totally. The United State is a sovereign country. The United Nations does not authorize anything for the United States, and the United Nations does not have any control of the United States, and we want to make sure that remains our core value as we go forward.

However, years ago, Gingrich apparently thought that a new “international bureaucracy” being created for environmental matters was a fine idea.

US Embassy in Paris, 14 Jun 2005, “French discuss UN reform issues with Newt Gingrich”:

[French diplomat Jean-Maurice] Ripert said that France also favored a universal UN environmental organization to address issues currently dealt with by 500 conventions and autonomous secretariats all over the world. He envisioned an environmental body similar to WIPO [World Intellectual Property Organization], having a small secretariat. Gingrich said that this was a good idea and …

How come we never heard about Rev. Wright enough from the MSM?

By now, the sermons, lectures, and commentaries of Jeremiah Wright quoted, reproduced, and discussed by other sources, ranging from broadcast and cable television and radio, to print and, of course, weblogs and the Internet-based audio- and video-hosting platforms such as YouTube, have been so numerous that sheer scale alone makes it impossible to define where his allegedly “controversial” and “offensive” statements begin, and where they end. But the relative intensity of coverage tells part of the story. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, for the first 125 days of 2008 (January 1–May 4), the Wright-Obama relationship was the most frequently reported news item, receiving roughly 3.8-times more attention than did the second most frequently reported item, how the “superdelegates” were aligning in the primary process; it was covered 4.9-times as heavily as John McCain’s ties to lobbyists.13 Wright and his views also towered over the meager attention given to the views of Hagee, Parsley, and Robertson, and to their relationships with McCain. Media Matters for America reports that between February 27 and April 30—the 27th having been the date on which Hagee endorsed McCain in San Antonio while McCain was campaigning with Parsley in Ohio—the New York Times and Washington Post “published more than 12 times as many articles” mentioning Wright and Obama as they did mentioning Hagee and McCain. In terms of editorials and op-eds, the ratio was even greater—more than 15 to 1.14

Similar patterns were true across the board. For the ninety-six-day period from …

Our AIPAC-owned Congress

H. R. 2893: To prohibit Foreign Military Financing program assistance to countries that vote in the United Nations General Assembly in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state in the absence of a negotiated border agreement between the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

H. RES. 297: To withhold United States contributions to the United Nations until the United Nations formally retracts the final report of the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.”

H. R. 2589: To prohibit certain activities in support of the Arab League boycott of Israel, and for other purposes.

H. RES. 297: Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Secretary of State should withhold United States contributions to the regularly assessed biennial budget of the United Nations for purposes of the General Assembly of the United Nations if the General Assembly adopts a resolution in favor of recognizing a state of Palestine outside of or prior to a final status agreement negotiated between, and acceptable to, the State of Israel and the Palestinians.

H. R. 1609: To amend the War Powers Resolution to limit the use of funds for introduction of the Armed Forces into hostilities, and for other purposes.

(a) No funds available for the United States Armed Forces may be obligated or expended for introduction of the Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, in the absence of a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization or obligation

RedState.com blogger tells a whopper about Troy Davis’ “bloody shorts”

For the first time in 50 years the United States Supreme Court ordered a federal court to conduct an entire rehearing of all the evidence. The court did and found all the new stuff was, again, “smoke and mirrors,” including the retracted confessions. […] And then, if we really want to get into the weeds and talk about facts, consider this fact. Troy Davis immediately became the suspect and fled. Police roped off his house, obtained entry, and searched the home. In the laundry they found Troy Davis’s shorts from that night with evidence on the clothing directly tying him to Officer MacPhail’s murder — Officer MacPhail’s blood.

In re Troy Anthony Davis, No. CV409-130, (S.D. Ga. Aug. 24, 2010), p. 161, footnote 97:

The State introduced evidence regarding Mr. Davis’s “bloody” shorts. (See Resp. Ex. 67.) However, even the State conceded that this evidence lacked any probative value of guilt, submitting it only to show what the Board of Pardons and Parole had before it. (Evidentiary Hearing Transcript at 468-69.) Indeed, there was insufficient DNA to determine who the blood belonged to, so the shorts in no way linked Mr. Davis to the murder of Officer MacPhail. The blood could have belonged to Mr. Davis, Mr. Larry Young, Officer MacPhail, or even have gotten onto the shorts entirely apart from the events of that night. Moreover, it is not even clear that the substance was blood. (See Pet. Ex. 46.)

Yeah. Probably should try actually reading the …

Conservatives these days: Right for the wrong reasons

“Wall Street owns our government,” [Glenn] Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

–Frank Rich, NYT Op-Ed, 20 Sep. 2009

Far more interesting than Beck himself is the increasingly futile effort to classify the protest movement to which he has connected himself. Here, too, confusion reigns. In part, this is due to the fact that these “tea party” and “9/12″ protests are composed of factions with wildly divergent views about most everything. From paleoconservatives to Ron-Paul-libertarians to LaRouchians to Confederacy-loving, race-driven Southerners to Christianist social conservatives to single-issue fanatics (abortion, guns, gays) to standard Limbaugh-following, Bush-loving Republicans, these protests are an incoherent mishmash without any cohesive view other than: “Barack Obama is bad.” There are unquestionably some highly noxious elements in these groups, but they are far from homogeneous. Many of these people despised the Bush-led …

Zionists feign outrage over map on Palestinian web site

The logo of “the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations” – on their website and on top of their official statements at the U.N. – shows the Palestinian Authority’s claim to a Palestine that stretches throughout the entire historical entity of the former Palestine mandate.

Absent from the logo is any hint that Palestine consists of anything other than Arab territory. No nod is given even to the U.N.’s 1948 decision to divide the region into Jewish and Arab sectors. As for the shape of Israel by the time it was forced into waging the defensive Six Day war in 1967: irrelevant. The logo illustrates that the Palestinian bid before the U.N. for support of a unilateral declaration of statehood is disingenuous and dangerous.

There is not too much left to the imagination here: Israel is “wiped off the map.”

London Underground ad produced by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism:

Palestine Solidarity Campaign:

Posters have recently appeared in London Underground tube stations advertising Israel as a tourist destination. The map on the advert depicts Israel as incorporating the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who calls the West Bank “Judea and Samaria” really has no right to complain about being “wiped off the map” anyways.…