Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown helped seal his 2010 electoral defeat after a live mic caught him calling an elderly voter a “bigot” (in reaction to a bigoted statement said voter…
Immigration
Your federal dollars at work: A Homeland Security/ICE checkpoint apparently checking passers-by for proof of United States citizenship. As the fellow in this video points out, it is more than likely a pretense to snoop for drugs. Remember the magic phrase: “Am I being detained? Am I free to go?” Oh! Also remember to have a camera and witnesses. DISCLAIMER: This is not to be construed as legal advice, and your own your own success implementing this strategy may – and probably will – depend on your gender, ethnicity and the color of your skin. Exercising your rights may result in side effects up to and including: Ass-beatings by thugs with badges, indefinite detentions, trumped-up charges, placement on watch lists and even death.
In response to recent anti-immigration comments by the eurosceptic UK Independence Party, Romanian newspaper Gandul has launched a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign to promote British tourism to the eastern European country. Featuring the…
For those who are still quite fond of their 4th Amendment rights, Ron Paul raised the alarm over on his official Facebook page earlier today that the Senate’s current immigration reform package is a civil liberties nightmare.
The former Congressman and presidential candidate warned that the proposed McCain/Schumer immigration “reform” plan, as it exists now, would usher in warrantless surveillance of US citizens using drones, a de facto mandatory national ID system barring those without it from working legally, increased federal database information on US citizens, and the further erosion of our core civil rights under the guise of keeping our economy “safe” from a mostly non-existent wave of illegal immigration.
Scariest paragraph of Ron Paul’s post: “Harper rightly notes that E-Verify is in fact a national ID card, writing last week that, ‘the system must biometrically identify everyone who works—you, me, and every working American you know. There is no way to do internal enforcement of immigration law without a biometric national identity system.'”
Minority Report could be closer than we think. Open those eyes nice and wide for your iris scan, citizen!
I think Mitt Romney is running for the office of fakest human being to ever live …
Rob Beschizza writes on BoingBoing:
LulzSec announced Thursday evening the publication at Pirate Bay of a trove of leaked material from Arizona law enforcement agencies. Arizona’s Department of Public Safety confirmed shortly thereafter that it was hacked.
In the press release included with the dump, a LulzSec affiliate outlines a more activist agenda than is usually associated with the group:
We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona.
The documents classified as “law enforcement sensitive”, “not for public distribution”, and “for official use only” are primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups, and protest movements.
This powerful animated video exposes how our immigrant community is being sold to private prisons for obscene profits.
Top three facts to know about private prisons (via immigrantsforsale.org):
- The victims: Private prisons don’t care about who they lock up. At a rate of $200 per immigrant a night…
Legal immigrants to the US have been allowed to gain citizenship after joining the military. By allowing citizenship to be approved while in boot camp, there’s less bureaucratic paperwork during deployment and…
While “hate groups” undoubtedly can be a problem for a civil society, I believe this article is awfully biased against those who are rationally weary of Big Gov. CNN reports: The number…
Come on guys, the War on Terror is a serious matter! From Great Britain, hijinks ensue as immigration officials put their nagging wives on the terrorist watchlist to prevent their returning from…
A great extra from the fantastic movie Children of Men. Modern philosophers, political scientists, and climate scientists weigh-in on the state of the Earth, global politics, militarism, mass-migration, global warming, and the future of humanity.
(For the disinfo regular, I’d recommend the watching the movie The Constant Gardener and the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, but perhaps you already have…)
Who would suspect an elderly white man? Nobody. At least, that’s what the young man from Hong Kong thought. While the facial disguise was quite impressive, he forgot to make his hands…
Maybe this is what Tea Baggers mean by “leaner, more efficient government”? Privatising the process altogether? Alex Pareene at Salon explores Arizona’s sell out of its citizens to the highest corporate bidder:…
Sometimes patience does pay off. A century of patience. BBC News reports: More than a century after she crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the US, Eulalia Garcia has become an…
From the Nation:
Since he left CNN last November, after Latino groups mounted a protest campaign against his inflammatory rhetoric, Dobbs has continued to advocate an enforcement-first approach to immigration, emphasizing, as he did in a March 2010 interview on Univision, that “the illegal employer is the central issue in this entire mess!”
His scheduled October 9 address at the Virginia Tea Party Convention will mark his second major Tea Party address of the year…
Stephen Colbert testified before Congress recently, and a good amount of the media have been trying to deflect from his message by accusing him of “wasting time.”
Isn’t it interesting though that they didn’t think it was such a waste of time when, a few years earlier, Chris Farley made an appearance there?
First Elmo, then Kevin Costner, and now Stephen Colbert gets to testify before Congress at an immigration hearing entitled “Protecting America’s Harvest.” With Colbert testifying in Congress and Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Return Sanity,” the lines between politics and political comedy are increasingly blurred. From New York Daily News:
It’s no joke — Stephen Colbert will testify before Congress.
The Comedy Central host will head to Capitol Hill and appear before a House Judiciary subcommittee for a hearing on immigration called “Protecting America‘s Harvest.”
Colbert will speak alongside United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez.
The comedian spent a day working at a farm in New York last month after Rodriguez came on the show to discuss UFW’s “Take Our Jobs” campaign, which challenges the view that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans.
Continues at New York Daily News …
You have to love the irony of this: right-wing conservatives in America tend towards the climate change denial camp and refuse to support measures to combat global warming, yet a new report…
President Barack Obama, along with the Justice Department, filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona for the passing of an immigration law that would allow the failure of carrying proper documentation…
Joan Lowy writes on the AP via Yahoo News: Unmanned aircraft have proved their usefulness and reliability in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the pressure’s on to allow them…
From CBS World News: A U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a 15-year-old Mexican boy after a group trying to illegally enter Texas threw rocks at officers near downtown El Paso, U.S….
Your ethnicity, citizenship, and place of birth don’t matter — if you’re brown, you’re now in danger of being deported “back to Mexico”:
What is wrong with Arizona?!? By Jordan Fabian for The Hill:
Who knew that Kermit the Frog was this into politics. The campaign of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has put out a video that features a frog puppet — that looks much like the famous Sesame Street character — to help sell the state’s controversial immigration law.
The frog encourages opponents to read the immigration law before criticizing it.
Some may scoff, but the law has boosted Brewer in the polls over her Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard.
Watch it here:
WTF America? This poll was taken at the end of April. It’s interesting how many of these poll-takers believe immigration (in itself — legal or illegal — according to this poll) hurts the United States. Would have liked to see the question asked how many of these people are still concerned about terrorism, but I guess since Wall Street managed to destroy our economy (including millions of jobs and people’s life savings) economic concerns are overriding security ones. Reports UPI:
Seven in 10 U.S. adults support arresting people who can’t prove they’re in the United States legally, a poll about Arizona’s new immigration law indicated.
The Angus Reid Public Opinion poll of 1,002 American adults asked respondents if they’d want four guidelines in Arizona’s immigration law enacted in their own state.
Feel free to add the entire state of Arizona to this map. Source: ACLU
The law, the nation’s toughest, seeks to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants and gives police broad powers to stop people on suspicion of being in the United States illegally.
Seventy-one percent of poll respondents said they’d support requiring their own police to determine people’s U.S. status if there was “reasonable suspicion” the people were illegal immigrants, the poll found.
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media: For a country that prides itself on its freedoms, we’ve systematically begun to dismantle them in favor of a perceived sense of safety. We have the…