FDIC Could Be In Trouble!!

Via(Bloomberg)

Bair Says Insurance Fund Could Be Insolvent This Year

By Alison Vekshin

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the fund it uses to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.

“Without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year,” Bair wrote in a March 2 letter to the industry. U.S. community banks plan to flood the FDIC with about 5,000 letters in protest of the fees, according to a trade group.

“A large number” of bank failures may occur through 2010 because of “rapidly deteriorating economic conditions,” Bair said in the letter. “Without substantial amounts of additional assessment revenue in the near future, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero or even become negative.”

The FDIC last week approved a one-time “emergency” fee and other assessment increases on the industry to rebuild a fund to repay customers for deposits of as much as $250,000 when a bank fails. The fees, opposed by the industry, may generate $27 billion this year after the fund fell to $18.9 billion in the fourth quarter from $34.6 billion in the previous period, the FDIC said.

The fund, which lost $33.5 billion in 2008, was drained by 25 bank failures last year. Sixteen banks have failed so far this year, further straining the fund.

Angry Bankers

Smaller banks are outraged over the one-time fee, which could wipe out 50 percent to 100 percent of a bank’s 2009 earnings, Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

“I’ve never seen emotions like this,” said Fine, adding that he’s received more than 1,000 e-mails and telephone messages from angry bankers.

“The FDIC realizes that these assessments are a significant expense, particularly during a financial crisis and recession when bank earnings are under pressure,” Bair wrote. “We did not want to impose large assessments when the industry and economy are struggling. We searched for alternatives but found none better.”

The agency, which has released the change for 30 days of public comment, could modify the assessment to shift the burden to the large banks “that caused this train wreck,” Fine said. “Community bankers are feeling like they are paying for the incompetence and greed of Wall Street,” he said.

Legal Constraints

Bair dismissed that suggestion.

“For risk-based assessments, our statute restricts us from discriminating against an institution because of size,” Bair wrote.

The deposit insurance fund won’t dry up because the government can get funds from the industry and congressional appropriations, and borrow from the Treasury, Chip MacDonald, a partner specializing in financial services at law firm Jones Day, said today in a telephone interview.

“As a depositor, I am not worried in the least,” MacDonald said. “No one is going to let the FDIC go without any money.”

Consumers should watch this issue closely, said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director at U.S. PIRG, a Boston- based consumer-watchdog group.

“I wouldn’t take their money out of the bank yet,” Mierzwinski said. “If the FDIC is saying that there is this serious problem, then we should all be concerned. I think there is a chance the FDIC is going to have to ask taxpayers for money in the future.”

No Taxpayer Funds

Bair rejected arguments that the agency should use government aid to rebuild the fund. The FDIC has authority to tap a $30 billion line of credit at the Treasury Department and legislation pending in Congress would boost the amount to $100 billion.

“Banks, not taxpayers, are expected to fund the system,” Bair said. Asking for taxpayer support “could paint all banks with the ‘bailout’ brush.”

The FDIC “will revise the interim rule, if appropriate, in light of the comments received,” the agency said in a Federal Register notice.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alison Vekshin in Washington at avekshin@bloomberg.net .

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Jihadi Training Camps in the US!!

Via(CentrePoint News)

News of jihadi training camps in the US hits mainstream

By Editor and Agency Reports

Last fall this publication interviewed terrorism expert Brigitte Gabriel who reported that Islamic groups operate numerous training camps on US soil.

At the time, the mainstream press rejected those reports as the product of anti-Muslim bigotry or extremist imaginations.

As of this past weekend, Fox News’ Sean Hannity reported on the presence of the suspected camps.

See the video here…

http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=185279&page=1

The camps exist in New York, Washington State, South Carolina and Texas.

For more information on Islamic jihad in the United States, click to Jihad Watch at…

http://www.jihadwatch.org/

To take action, contact Act for America at…

http://www.actforamerica.org/

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

<!– –>

Liberal Defends Rush Limbaugh on Huff Post!

Via(WSJ Opinion)

An Honest Leftist

“You’re damn right I wanted the Iraq war to fail.”

By JAMES TARANTO

Best of the Tube Tomorrow Morning
We’re scheduled to appear on a “Fox and Friends” political panel tomorrow at around 7:15 a.m. ET. If you’re an extremely early riser, or a West Coast insomniac, tune in and see us on the Fox News Channel.

An Honest Leftist
Back when George W. Bush was president, this column would occasionally observe that many on the Democratic left were hoping that America would lose the Iraq war. This seemed to us an obvious observation, but it never failed to scandalize our loyal left-wing readership. But a Lee Stranahan, writing on the Puffington Host, admits it: “You’re damn right I wanted the Iraq war to fail.”

Well, two cheers to Stranahan for his honesty. (We’ll explain below why we’re withholding the third cheer.) What makes this acknowledgment even better is that Stranahan offers it in the course of defending the good faith of a man who, now that Bush is an ex-president, is the left’s favorite demon figure, Rush Limbaugh.

Responding to Limbaugh’s speech last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Stranahan writes:

Limbaugh wants Barack Obama’s economic policies to fail. He said it, he said it again, and he said it again at CPAC. Limbaugh was quickly accused of treason, more or less, and now he says he doesn’t understand what all the outrage is about. All he said was that he hopes the economic recovery plan fails. . . .

I wanted the Bush policy on Iraq to fail because the war and the ideas it was based were in complete opposition to my basic principles about how The United States should use its wealth and power. . . . Not because I hate our country or hate the troops but for the exact opposite reason–because I love my country and I value the lives of the people sworn to protect it. If you opposed the war, I bet you feel the same way. . . .

I believe that Limbaugh wants the president to fail because he loves the country, too. . . .

I assume Rush Limbaugh feels the same way, more or less, about the president’s economic plan. I bet he simply can’t bear the idea of a world where massive government spending is effective and therefore popular because “it works.”

Read the Rest of the Story Here:

I will say that Mr. Stranahan is honest and for that we say thank you for doing what the rest of the Left and the MSM is not willing to do.  And that is, put Rush’s quote into context.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Hudson Crash Survivors, thinking Lawsuits!!

Via(Gadling)

Big surprise: Lawsuits could be on the horizon in US Airways flight 1549 accident

Today marks one month since the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson,” when US Airways flight 1549 ditched into the New York river and narrowly avoided catastrophe after colliding with a flock of birds and losing both engines shortly after take off from LaGuardia.

The flight’s captain, Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, has become a national hero, but the incident itself has largely faded from the spotlight, helped in no small part by this past week’s plane crash in Buffalo.

A week after the US Airways accident, Tom posted about the airline being prompt in its efforts to financially compensate every passenger on board the plane that day — to the tune of $5,000 each, plus a fare refund. A Gadling reader named Bill commented, “I’m guessing those $5,000 checks won’t stop any lawsuits.”

Bill might be right.

I was sifting through some of last month’s coverage of the accident this afternoon when I stumbled upon this story in USA Today. The story, among other things, reports that a New York law firm called Kreindler & Kreindler is already — surprise, surprise — sniffing around the fringes of the accident to see what lawsuits can be filed. Specifically, a partner at the firm named Noah Kushlefsky tells the newspaper that several passengers have contacted the firm since the accident and that right now lawyers are looking into what injuries and emotional distress passengers might have suffered and whether they are actionable.

Two things are important to point out. First, according to various accounts, most passengers say they’ve been very satisfied with how US Airways has handled the accident’s aftermath. They say the compensation is generous and claim to have no plans to sue. Second, most of those who say they are not happy insist the $5,000 check from the airline simply isn’t enough to cover all they lost in the accident. (US Airways says that it will cover claims above $5,000 if passengers indeed lost more.)

That doesn’t seem good enough for at least one passenger, Joe Hart, a salesman from Charlotte.

Mr. Hart says he lost more than $5,000 worth of personal belongings. But it appears he’s thinking beyond just straight compensation. He tells USA Today that he has talked to a lawyer in Charlotte and is waiting “to see how things play out with US Airways. I’m hopeful US Airways understands the significance of the incident.”

Gail Dunham, the director of the National Air Disaster Alliance & Foundation, says $5,000 is not enough from US Airways because, among other things, passengers experienced a “terrific ordeal” (Read: mental anguish, post traumatic stress, etc…)

That’s what Mr. Hart is citing: He tells USA Today that flying for him has become “progressively more difficult” during the six flights he’s made since the accident. On a LA-Philadelphia run recently, he said he was sweaty and nervous and “felt every bid of turbulence.”

So, what do you think? To me, it sounds like Mr. Hart is already laying the groundwork for a lawsuit based on emotional distress.

I am all for passengers recovering what they lost in the accident, and if it is indeed more than $5,000 that’s fine.

However, it seems outright laughable, given the pretty much universal conclusion that the crew of Flight 1549, including Capt. Sullenberger, performed their jobs to the highest standards and saved 150 lives, that anyone would be considering suing the airline for something like negligence or mental anguish. Hell, did you hear Capt. Sullenberger on 60 Minutes? He said he couldn’t sleep for three days after the accident! Can he sue?

And let’s not even get into the ambulance-chasing element of a law firm like Kreindler & Kreindler, which, one can safely assume, is at least telling those who have called the firm that they may truly have a case. After all, they have lawyers looking into things — though what, exactly, is hard to know: The airplane struck a flock of birds.

I don’t want to get too down about this before any legal action is actually taken, but I was sort of hoping that this whole thing would pass without the utterance of that most sacred of American traditions: the lawsuit. Weren’t you?

Spend any significant amount of time outside the United States and you gradually come to understand that people are less curious about our politics than they are about our fixation on punishment and resolution, and our ultimate faith in the judicial system as the chief instrument to meet those ends.

That America is a litigious society is undeniable, and outsiders want to know why this is so. They see a country of overcrowded jails, a country where legal redress is a warm blanket against the cold, a country where people probably won’t be all that surprised if someone sued the very airline that actually saved his life.

Anymore, they see a country where the words “land of the free” never ring quite as loudly as “see you in court.”

Related Link

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Smerconish, Should Just Register Democrat!

It was brought to my attention that I carelessly used material and missed acknowledging the source of the story.  I want to make sure this is not the way I do things and I apologize for my carelessness and will do a better job in the future.

The original article the GrassrootsPA, linked to came from FinkelBlog.  I encourage all my readers to visit his blog, very good content.

Via(GrassrootsPA)

Smerconish: ‘We Need To Dilute Influence Of Conservatives In Primaries’

Yo Smerc: who’s “we”?  You voted for Barack Obama . . .

But let’s leave Michael Smerconish’s presidential preferences aside and focus on the substance of his remarks.  On this evening’s Hardball, Smerconish claimed that Republicans  need to “dilute the influence of the conservatives in the Republican presidential nominating process, because we are nominating people who can’t get elected.”

Smerconish was responding to a clip of Rush Limbaugh calling on RNC Chairman Michael Steele to do just the opposite, and do something “about our open primary system and fixing it so that Democrats do not nominate our candidates.”

If you watch the video clip, you’ll see that Pat Buchanan was dying to jump in, but Chris Matthews had to end the segment.  So let me say what I’m guessing was on Pat’s mind:

Did you pay any attention to the election, Mike? Are you aware that we nominated the most moderate candidate in the Republican field?  Ever heard of John McCain?  You know, the man who:

• Opposed the Bush tax cuts when they were proposed.
• Is the infamous co-author of the assault on the First Amendment known as McCain-Feingold
• Is Ted Kennedy’s best open-border friend.
• Opposed to drilling in ANWR.

We nominated McCain and got drilled by  Obama. If McCain isn’t liberal enough for you, Mike, who’s your dream Republican candidate: Dennis Kucinich?

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Iraq Withdrawal was Who’s Plan?

Via(INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY)

The Bush Pullout

Iraq War: President Obama traveled to Camp Lejeune, N.C., on Friday to announce that the U.S. would stay in Iraq at least until 2012 and keep 50,000 troops there even after combat ends. Sound familiar?

Obama’s withdrawal plan would take U.S. forces in Iraq down from a current 142,000 troops to 35,000 to 50,000. Under the status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iran, negotiated and signed last year by the Bush administration, all forces must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

In short, though President Obama will get credit, it was Bush’s plan — not Obama’s.

When Obama first began running for the nation’s highest office in 2006, he vowed he would immediately withdraw all U.S. combat forces if elected. At the time, few with any knowledge about the conflict in Iraq took him seriously.

And sure enough, faced with the realities on the ground in Iraq and in the campaign back home, Obama changed his stance last year from immediately withdrawing all combat forces to one of removing, as his campaign Web site said, “one to two combat brigades each month, and (having) all our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.”

Now comes his much-awaited plan. Technically, Obama won’t be able keep his most recent promise on troop withdrawals, but he’ll come close. For that he can thank President Bush and the highly successful “surge” in troops he and Gen. David Petraeus put in place, making withdrawal possible.

In Friday’s remarks, Obama told the assembled Marines: “Today I’ve come to speak to you about how the war in Iraq will end.” But in fact, the actual war has been over for some time. We hate to tell the Bush-haters out there, or to relive painful recent history, but President Bush won it, making the current pullout possible.

That victory was underscored in January when Iraq held largely peaceful elections, in which voters mostly repudiated extremist parties in favor of the moderate leadership of Nouri al-Maliki.

In his comments Friday, Obama noted the progress made.

“Thanks in great measure to your service,” he said, “the situation in Iraq has improved. Violence has been reduced substantially from the horrific sectarian killing of 2006 and 2007.

“Al-Qaida in Iraq has been dealt a serious blow by our troops and Iraq’s Security Forces, and through our partnership with Sunni Arabs,” Obama continued. “The capacity of Iraq’s Security Forces has improved, and Iraq’s leaders have taken steps toward political accommodation.”

He further lauded January’s elections showing Iraqis have begun “pursuing their aspirations through peaceful political process.”

All very true. Iraq has been a big success, which explains why you never see or hear about it in the mainstream news anymore. Suicide bombings and attacks on troops have become relatively rare, and now that Bush is out of office, there’s little political profit remaining for the left in bashing America’s bold Mideast initiative.

Whether you agree with Bush or not, he brought a kind of democracy to Iraq that can be found nowhere else in that region. His plan rocked al-Qaida back on its heels, to the point where its survival is in doubt. Iraq is a model.

In short, Obama’s policy is really, in most respects, Bush’s policy. That the troops can now come home proudly is a tribute to Bush’s steadfastness. But Obama will be wise not to remove them all.

We kept troops in Europe and Japan after World War II and in South Korea after the Korean War. Bush’s policy proved that democracy can take root where no one thought possible. But as in Europe, Korea and Japan, it must be protected.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Due to Drug War, Help Needed On U.S. Border!

Via(Washington Times)

Homeland security: Help needed on U.S. border

The drug war is on.

On the same day that the secretary of homeland security told Congress that drug-related violence along the Mexican border had grown beyond the ability of the department to handle, the DEA announced an operation against a major Mexican drug cartel that netted more than 750 suspects – almost all of them in the U.S.

“I believe this is going to require more than the Department of Homeland Security,” Janet Napolitano said Wednesday during her first Capitol Hill appearance since her confirmation last month as homeland security secretary.

“So we are reaching out to the national security adviser, to the attorney general and others about how we within the United States make sure we are doing all we can in a coordinated way to support the president of Mexico,” said Ms. Napolitano, explaining that containing border-related drug violence will require more than the 22 agencies and 200,000 employees in her department.

TWT RELATED STORY: 755 arrested in drug cartel operation

Border violence, which claimed more than 1,000 lives in January and about 6,000 in 2008, is already on the radar of Pentagon and CIA officials, who have told The Washington Times of their involvement in the current crisis in Mexico and say they are watching developments closely.

U.S. intelligence officials told The Times that the effects of the global economic crisis on Mexico have helped narcotics traffickers recruit more people and corrupt more Mexican officials.

At his first meeting with reporters Wednesday, new CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said that Mexico was a “priority” for the agency.

“Mexico is an area of concern because of the drug wars going on there,” Mr. Panetta said. “The president [of Mexico] has courageously taken on that issue, but nevertheless, it’s an area that we are paying attention to, a lot of attention to.”

Meanwhile Wednesday, Justice Department officials announced the arrest of 755 people associated with Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel as part of a two-year probe dubbed “Operation Xcellerator.” The operation also netted $59 million, 12,000 kilograms of cocaine, 16,000 pounds of marijuana and about 1.3 million Ecstasy pills.

But as a measure of how thoroughly Mexico’s deadly drug gangs have entrenched themselves in the U.S., Justice Department officials said only 20 of the arrests took place in Mexico, with the rest taking place north of the border.

And in a specific example of the spread of Mexican drug-gang violence across the U.S., a confidential Department of Homeland Security advisory said an assassination attempt on a South Carolina deputy sheriff was the work of three illegal immigrants as part of a Mexican-American gang with ties to the drug trade.

Lexington County, S.C., Deputy Sheriff Ted Xanthakis and his K-9, Arcos, both survived the ambush by three men armed with a 12-gauge shotgun during a Feb. 8 incident in West Columbia, S.C.

Two of the men were identified in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report as members of the Surenos gang, or SUR-13, a collection of hundreds of Mexican-American street gangs with origins in the oldest barrios of Southern California and which federal law enforcement agencies accuse of involvement in smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants.

Violence on the Mexican border and its reverberations throughout the U.S. are emerging as one of the gravest and least expected problems confronting the Obama administration, a point that was made by President George W. Bush in a late December interview with The Washington Times.

Mr. Obama will need to deal “with these drug cartels in our own neighborhood,” Mr. Bush said. “And the front line of the fight will be Mexico. The drug lords will continue to search for a soft underbelly. And one of the things that future presidents are going to have to make sure of is that they don’t find a safe haven in parts of Central America.”

In her testimony Wednesday, Ms. Napolitano sounded a similar note, saying: “I’ve actually found the situation in Mexico one of the top priority items on my desk. It was on my desk when I was governor of Arizona, but as the secretary of homeland security, I see it in a much broader way.”

Thousands of Mexican troops have been sent to the border by President Felipe Calderon to patrol drug routes and bust drug runners.

But the drug cartels have retaliated at levels of violence never before seen, and Ms. Napolitano warned that failure could turn Mexico’s border areas into a war zone that the central government cannot effectively control, as happened in Colombia.

“They’ve been targeting in some of those homicides public officials [and] law enforcement officers as a process of intimidation,” Ms. Napolitano said.

The homeland security chief has already met with Mexico’s attorney general and the U.S. ambassador there, and said the U.S. is “working to support President Calderon in his efforts.”

“That is primarily the product of the president of Mexico and his government going after these large drug cartels, so that we never run the risk, never run the risk of Mexico descending into, say, where Colombia was 15 years ago,” Ms. Napolitano said.

The cocaine trade turned Colombia into a battle zone, with the Medellin and Cali cartels able to attack the highest levels of Colombian politics with kidnappings and assassinations.

The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on anti-drug efforts, and teamed up with the Colombian government to knock down cocaine production, but to this day the national government in Bogota does not effectively control large parts of the country, where the drug-linked Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is the de facto government.

U.S. officials will focus in particular on the traffic of guns and cash from the U.S. to Mexico to support “these very, very violent cartels,” Ms. Napolitano said.

“I believe our country has a vital relationship with Mexico, and I believe that Mexico right now has issues of violence that are of a different degree and level than we’ve ever seen before,” she said.

“But in my view, from a homeland security standpoint, this is going to be an issue, working with Mexico, that is going to be of real priority interest over these coming months,” Ms. Napolitano said.

The Obama administration says that the drug-gang violence on the U.S. side of the border does not match what is going on in Mexico’s border states, but says there is a contingency plan in place that will not include militarizing the U.S. side of the boundary.

• Sara A. Carter, Ben Conery and Jerry Seper contributed to this report.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R Bootie

Raise Taxes On The Rich All You Want, Won’t Help!

Via(The WSJ -Opinion Journal)

The 2% Illusion

Take everything they earn, and it still won’t be enough.

President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end “tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans,” and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won’t see their taxes increased by “one single dime.”

This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama’s new spending ambitions.

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and “the wealthiest 2%.” Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That’s about 7% of all returns; the data aren’t broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% — about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 — paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already “progressive” with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He’d also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won’t come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

But let’s not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

Fast forward to this year (and 2010) when the Wall Street meltdown and recession are going to mean far few taxpayers earning more than $500,000. Profits are plunging, businesses are cutting or eliminating dividends, hedge funds are rolling up, and, most of all, capital nationwide is on strike. Raising taxes now will thus yield far less revenue than it would have in 2006.

Mr. Obama is of course counting on an economic recovery. And he’s also assuming along with the new liberal economic consensus that taxes don’t matter to growth or job creation. The truth, though, is that they do. Small- and medium-sized businesses are the nation’s primary employers, and lower individual tax rates have induced thousands of them to shift from filing under the corporate tax system to the individual system, often as limited liability companies or Subchapter S corporations. The Tax Foundation calculates that merely restoring the higher, Clinton-era tax rates on the top two brackets would hit 45% to 55% of small-business income, depending on how inclusively “small business” is defined. These owners will find a way to declare less taxable income.

The bottom line is that Mr. Obama is selling the country on a 2% illusion. Unwinding the U.S. commitment in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire can’t possibly pay for his agenda. Taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise as well.

On that point, by the way, it’s unclear why Mr. Obama thinks his climate-change scheme won’t hit all Americans with higher taxes. Selling the right to emit greenhouse gases amounts to a steep new tax on most types of energy and, therefore, on all Americans who use energy. There’s a reason that Charlie Rangel’s Ways and Means panel, which writes tax law, is holding hearings this week on cap-and-trade regulation.

Mr. Obama is very good at portraying his agenda as nothing more than center-left pragmatism. But pragmatists don’t ignore the data. And the reality is that the only way to pay for Mr. Obama’s ambitions is to reach ever deeper into the pockets of the American middle class.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Texas Preparing For Mexican Drug Violence!!

Via(NationalTerrorAlert)

Mexican Drug Violence Has Crossed U.S. Border, State Officials Say

The violence associated with Mexican drug cartels is now spilling over onto the America side of the border in Arizona and Texas, state officials have admitted.

The New York Times reports that Arizona has seen a dramatic spike in drug-related abductions, home invasions, and even men dressed in SWAT gear wielding military-grade weaponry.

A home invasion here last year was carried out by attackers wielding military-style rifles and dressed in uniforms similar to a Phoenix police tactical unit. The discovery of grenades and other military-style weaponry bound for Mexico is becoming more routine, as is hostage-taking and kidnapping for ransom, law enforcement officials said.

The Phoenix police regularly receive reports involving a border-related kidnapping or hostage-taking in a home.

The Maricopa County attorney’s office said such cases rose to 241 last year from 48 in 2004, though investigators are not sure of the true number because they believe many crimes go unreported.

The violence, said Commander Dan Allen of the State Department of Public Safety, is “reaching into Arizona, and that is what is really alarming local and state law enforcement.”

In Texas, state Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw told the El Paso Times that drug violence has indeed crossed the border.

“Yes, absolutely it has occurred; there’s no question about it,” he said.

The violence has led Governor Rick Perry to request an additional $135 million for border security from the state legislature.

This admission comes after news that Texas activated the lowest stage of its border security plan after protests and violence broke out in Mexican border towns last week and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, told reporters last Thursday that drug-related violence has not crossed the Mexican-American border.

“Right now it has not (crossed the border). But it is a contingency we have in mind because it could,” she said. “We have contingency plans should violence spread into the United States.”

Read Full Article

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Jury Awards Illegal Aliens Money!

Jury: Rancher didn’t violate illegal immigrants’ rights

TUCSON, Ariz. — A federal jury found Tuesday that a southern Arizona rancher didn’t violate the civil rights of a group of illegal immigrants who said he detained them at gunpoint in 2004.

The eight-member civil jury also found Roger Barnett wasn’t liable on claims of battery and false imprisonment.

But the jury did find him liable on four claims of assault and four claims of infliction of emotional distress and ordered Barnett to pay $77,804 in damages — $60,000 of which were punitive.

Barnett declined to comment afterward, but one of his attorneys, David Hardy, said the plaintiffs lost on the bulk of their claims and that Barnett has a good basis for appeal on the two counts on which he lost.

“They won a fraction of the damages they were seeking,” Hardy said.

All six plaintiffs are citizens of Mexico, five of whom are living in the United States with visa applications pending, and the sixth resides in Mexico but was allowed into the U.S. for the trial, said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She declined to say where in the U.S. they’re residing.

Perales called the outcome “a resounding victory that sends a message that vigilante violence against immigrants will not be tolerated.”

David Urias, attorney for the plaintiffs, said, “Obviously we are disappointed with some aspects of the verdict. But I think that overall this was a victory for the plaintiffs.”

For years, Arizona has been the busiest point along the Mexican border for illegal immigrants entering the United States.

For more than a decade, Barnett has been a controversial figure in southern Arizona. He’s known for aggressively patrolling his ranch property and along highways and roads in the area, often with his wife and brothers, on the lookout for illegal immigrants.

The plaintiffs alleged that Barnett threatened them with his dog and told them he would shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Barnett’s lawyers argued that his land was inundated with illegal immigrants who left trash on his property, damaged his water supply and harmed his cattle.

Barnett’s wife and a brother were dismissed as defendants; in addition, 10 more people initially named as plaintiffs were dropped from the proceedings.

Barnett has been known to wear a holstered 9-mm pistol on his hip and upon coming across groups of migrants, to flash a blue and gold badge resembling that of the highway patrol, with the wording “Barnett Ranch Patrol. Cochise County. State of Arizona.”

The Barnetts detain and turn over those whom they encounter to the U.S. Border Patrol. In 2006, Barnett estimated that he had detained more than 10,000 illegal immigrants in 10 years.

His actions have resulted in formal complaints from the Mexican government against what it considers vigilante actions, and in several other lawsuits, including one stemming from an October 2004 incident.

In that case, a jury awarded a family of Mexican-Americans on a hunting trip $100,000 in damages, later upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court.

Barnett’s 22,000-acre ranch, about five miles north of the Mexican border, includes private and federal lease holdings in addition to nearly 14,000 acres of state-leased land.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie