California nears passage of a law whose effect, if not actual intent, will decimate the private nanny/caregiver industry in California. Not coincidentally, it will simultaneously benefit unions and the powerful institutional nursing/caregiver lobby. Cynically titled the “Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights,” AB 889 imposes a massive unfunded mandate on families and parents, and its indirect victims will be thousands of minorities who mostly populate the domestic worker ranks. In short, Democrats have declared war on California families and minorities in favor of Big Business and the SEIU.
AB 889 declares any person who hires a nanny, babysitter, or in-home caregiver an “employer” who must comply with a mountain of regulatory red tape such as buying workers comp insurance, maintaining meticulous time records, hiring “back up” workers to fill in during state-mandated breaks, and subjecting mom and dad to a dizzying and expensive array of legal hellfire penalties for compliance miscues. Imagine hiring a babysitter for a night then later being sued for an array of penalties because you failed to hire a second babysitter to cover during the first’s required breaks and dinner.
Parent-employers must also document and prove identification and citizenship with the worker’s social security number. The indirect effect will be massive unemployment among illegal immigrants – mostly Hispanics and minorities – who comprise a significant proportion of the domestic workforce.
So, parents, minorities and the poor stand to lose big under this law. Who stands to win? Big business, lobbyists, and unions.
Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who has worked for the Washington Post and Huffington Post, has revealed that he is an illegal alien. Vargas came out as an illegal alien as part of a coordinated media campaign with the New York Times and ABC News seeking amnesty for illegal aliens like himself.
Vargas also revealed that he breached White House security by using a fake ID, including when he covered a state dinner. And that a superior at the Washington Post knew and approved of his actions.
Vargas made the revelations in an article he authored that was published in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Vargas writes that at age 12 he was sent to America from the Philippines by his mother to live with his naturalized American citizen grandparents. His grandfather Lolo repeatedly broke the law to get Vargas in the U.S. and to keep him here, Vargas writes.
One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”
Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted Lolo. I remember him sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him, showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens — he worked as a security guard, she as a food server — and they had begun supporting my mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’ separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told me he purchased the card, along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other people,” he warned…
…The “uncle” who brought me here turned out to be a coyote, not a relative, my grandfather later explained. Lolo scraped together enough money — I eventually learned it was $4,500, a huge sum for him — to pay him to smuggle me here under a fake name and fake passport. (I never saw the passport again after the flight and have always assumed that the coyote kept it.) After I arrived in America, Lolo obtained a new fake Filipino passport, in my real name this time, adorned with a fake student visa, in addition to the fraudulent green card.
Using the fake passport, we went to the local Social Security Administration office and applied for a Social Security number and card. It was, I remember, a quick visit. When the card came in the mail, it had my full, real name, but it also clearly stated: “Valid for work only with I.N.S. authorization.”
When I began looking for work, a short time after the D.M.V. incident, my grandfather and I took the Social Security card to Kinko’s, where he covered the “I.N.S. authorization” text with a sliver of white tape. We then made photocopies of the card. At a glance, at least, the copies would look like copies of a regular, unrestricted Social Security card.
Later, with the help of sympathetic teachers, Vargas obtained a driver’s license in Oregon using subterfuge and a fake Social Security card.
Vargas parlayed his illegally obtained identification documents into a job at the Washington Post. He writes he confided in a superior, Peter Perl, who allowed him to continue working at the Post as an illegal alien in violation of the law.
John McCain, who has few fans in grassroots conservatism and even fewer in the MSM, was excoriated in the media over his recent remarks that the Arizona wildfires were started by illegal immigrants.
Jon Stewart, of course, mocked McCain on his show.
Massive wildfires in eastern Arizona that have scorched 250,000 acres were probably started by Mexican drug traffickers or human smugglers, an Arizona sheriff told Fox News on Wednesday.
The newly publicized life-story of award winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas seems to be one of those revelatory stories that tends to confirm some of the worst charges against liberals and the Old Media. The media sees no reason not to break the law, it employs people with political agendas, and all the while refuses to inform customers of the “news” that this is the case. As it happens, Vargas is an illegal immigrant in this country and has been for decades.
Vargas won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, he also made tongues wag recently with an exclusive interview with the reclusive founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. But his chief journalistic interest has been as a political reporter for the Washington Post.
Vargas tells ABC News that he found out that he had a fraudulent green card when he was a 16-year-old boy trying to apply for a California Driver’s license. The DMV told him his immigration card bought by his family in the Philippines was fake and “warned him not to return.”
Breakdown of the law number one was his family’s purposeful commission of a crime. Breakdown number two was a government agency assisting after the fact. The California DMV directly assisted an illegal immigrant and his entire family stay here as law breakers by telling a 16-year-old Vargas to run and hide from authorities.
Vargas took the DMV’s advice and began to train himself to speak without his native accent.
“I remember the very first instinct was, okay, that’s it, get rid of the accent… ‘Because I just thought to myself, you know, I couldn’t give anybody any reason to ever doubt that I’m an American,” Vargas said.
Notice how his “very first instinct” was to continue to break the law and compound that by engaging in subterfuge. Not to try and become a legal citizen.
I’m hard-pressed to understand why a producer for the Laura Ingraham Show would misleadingly push an audio clip of Ann Wagner on her show today discussing illegal immigration as seemingly damaging.
In the first place, Ingraham is certainly savvy enough to know an RNC Chair has nothing to do with policy formulation. She’s had Chairman Steele on often enough to know that. Nevertheless, she apparently felt compelled to go into the details on policy with Wagner. Okay, fine. But under the circumstances, it strikes me as calcualted more to inflame, than inform.
Formulating policy, immigration or otherwise, simply isn’t in any Chairman’s job description. They are there to support the party’s platform and the positions of GOP candidates running against Democrats, for the most part. It’s an administrative arm of the GOP in that sense.
Asked for a statement in response to the non-flap, Wagner offered, “My record of opposition to illegal immigration is unquestioned. Anyone who listens to the interview will recognize this is false advertising. The Congress should debate these issues, but we can’t do anything until we first secure the border.”
As far as I can tell from what’s provided, Wagner is totally in line with the basic conservative Republican position. She calls for border security first, opposes the DREAM Act and amnesty. She’s also in favor of debate around the 14th Amendment and if circumstances today serve the Founder’s intentions. That’s pretty much as far as I would want to see any RNC Chair go, lest they come under fire from the Hill for formulating policy.
Of course the Society of Professional Journalists would have a “Diversity Committee.” How else could liberals continue on with the thought policing of which they became so fond in college? Now, according to the SPJ’s The Quill, they think the AP style book should be changed to provide amnesty to illegal aliens until they are proven to be in the U.S. illegally.
Frequent use of the phrases “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” by our mainstream media is being questioned in order to remain faithful to the principles of our U.S. Constitution.
SPJ’s Diversity Committee met during the 2010 convention in Las Vegas and decided to engage in a yearlong educational campaign designed to inform and sensitize journalists as to the best language to use when writing and reporting on undocumented immigrants.
Megyn Kelly picked up on the topic at Fox News. Now, TPM is taking out after her. Given that so many self-professed journalists so routinely perform journalistic malpractice of the JournoList variety today, in the spirit of being certain, I propose we stop calling all of them journalists. We can just call them something fun, like typing monkeys, until we’re absolutely convinced they are capable of producing something akin to objective journalism, as opposed to the usual liberal spew they regularly regurgitate on cue.
Lou Dobbs committed the ultimate sin—he made a stand on principle.
For years Dobbs has fought against illegal immigration. He did it on CNN, he does it on his radio show.
Now, the most leftist magazine out there, The Nation has attacked Dobbs because they say a contractor that he used to run his property might have hired illegals. Dobbs makes is clear that he expects this kind of treatment from the libs at The Nation, but he is a little surprise that the activist old (mainstream) media has joined their chorus. Certainly he can’t be all that surprised.
The charges made by The Nation may be accurate on the surface, but they are without context. With illegal immigration as rampant as it is, to think that anybody who stands on principle against illegal immigration must check two, three or four sources removed to make sure that people hired by somebody hired who somebody hired might be here illegally is absolutely preposterous and the activist old media should say that, but, of course, they do not. (more…)
They took their protests right to the steps of Congress. Hundreds of students, including ten from Georgia, lobbied at the nation’s capitol for “The Dream Act,” which offers undocumented students a chance to become legal citizens.
I contend we don’t need “Immigration Reform” but “Enforcement Reform,” meaning the federal government should do its job and enforce the existing laws on the books. However, the children of illegal aliens believe they should get a pass because they didn’t do anything wrong.
Here’s my analogy on this situation….
Let’s say one day a family wakes up to the sound of the front door of their home being bashed in. The father is handcuffed and escorted out of the home by federal law enforcement officials and is charged with embezzlement. The family is told they have five minutes to gather their most personal belongings and then vacate the premises because their home and automobile are being seized because stolen money is believed to have purchased said assets. (more…)
Hard to believe, but true: the network actually presented both sides of the story, instead of the usual sob-sister boo-hoo about the “plight” of illegal “immigrants” who know that — thanks to a willful misrepresentation of the meaning of the 14th Amendment by the left– if they can just stagger across the finish line, a new life in el Norte awaits.
Just for fun, here’s the actual text of the 14th Amendment. Section One is the operative statement:
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
One of the things the Left is particularly adept at is changing the subject, deflecting any serious discussion of the subject at hand — in this case, the very real, post-9/11 national-security dangers of ”immigration” across our southern borders — both by demonizing its opponents as “racist” and ignoring the substance of the argument in favor of tear-jerking, or heartwarming (depending on necessity) tales of “just want to work” folks.
And the Right falls for it every time. So fearful are they of being called you-know-what that conservatives reflexively concede the Left’s positions and only then try to argue — at which point, of course, the discussion is already lost. The Left’s trained seals and pet poodles in the media enforce this intellectual conformity by framing the polite boundaries of the discussion and ruling off-limits any outside-the-narrative attempts to actually engage in real debate.
Example A: This report by the House Committee on Homeland Security from 2006, when the Republicans still controlled Congress, “A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat on the Southern Border.” Despite President Obama’s recent assurances that all is well in the lands along the Rio Grande, it’s hard to read this and not weep:
Gay rights activists equating their modern-day fight for ‘equality’ to post-slavery oppression of blacks. Muslim activists equating justified terror law enforcement investigation to racial profiling of blacks. The obese even formed a group complaining they were being discriminated against like blacks. When it comes time to beg for attention, victims choose black people to compare their woeful experiences to, even though the comparisons are insultingly inaccurate.
They gather on statehouse steps with signs and bullhorns, risking arrest. They attend workshops on civil disobedience and personal storytelling, and they hold sit-ins and walk out of class in protest. They’re being warned that they could even lose their lives.
“… they could even lose their lives.” Just who could we be talking about? (more…)
It’s the question no one from the press is asking. Who is lying?
Over the weekend a video of Sen. John Kyl at a North Tempe town hall meeting shot through the internet like a bullet. The video showed Sen. Kyl revealing to his constituents that President Obama was holding border security ransom for better bargaining position on comprehensive immigration reform.
The White House responded on Monday morning with a flat denial. Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said: “The President didn’t say that. Sen. Kyl knows the President didn’t say that.” That last phrase is inflammatory as it flatly claims that Sen. Kyl is deliberately lying about this issue.
Rather than let the matter die as a “he said, he said” story, bloggers scoured the internet for any other corroborating facts to bolster one position or the other. Yesterday, Naked Emperor News uncovered audio from an interview Sen. Obama gave to local public radio in Chicago. In it, he strikes the same juxtaposition of “trading-off” border security for comprehensive immigration reform, exactly as Sen. Kyl suggested: (more…)
I had the honor of meeting the owner of Border Invasion Pics after being tipped off that a Phoenix CBS affiliate had not only used some of his video of illegals entering Arizona, but also gave the impression they planted the video cameras along trails and branded the video with the KPHO logo.
A Vietnam veteran (who will remain anonymous as he’s received threats) surely must have better things to do with his time than planting cameras out in the Arizona sun, dodging illegal migrants and/or drug runners, and documenting the failure of the United States government to properly police our border.
I had to ask him, why create Border Invasion Pics?
BIP: When I began to have Border Patrol foot chases across my property I became more interested in the issue of illegal immigration. As I became more knowledgeable I realized that very few people around the country were aware of the massive numbers. I decided the best way to inform people was to show them. Having a lifetime of outdoor experience and skills, I began looking for alien trails to place cameras on.
Attorney General Eric Holder maligned Arizona law enforcement, said publicly that the state’s new immigration law is prone to racial profiling, and he hadn’t even read the law.
A former Vietnam veteran wanted the American people to know just how easy it was for illegal aliens to cross our southern border, so he set up cameras along the route and posted the video on his website. Many people came to his website, borderinvasionpics.com (BIP), including the local CBS affiliate in Phoenix, KPHO.
The affiliate was obviously so impressed with what they saw, they downloaded and used some of the video in a sympathetic piece on illegal aliens.
However, instead of obeying the rules of Journalism 101 and giving proper attribution to the person whose time and effort went into the creation of the ’shocking’ video, KPHO edited the footage into their own piece, zoomed in and cropped out the BIP logo and copyright, and inserted their CBS logo giving the viewing public the false impression the footage was a result of many months of hard work.
What happens when a reporter asks a Democratic Congressman whether he is willing to enforce the border against the trafficking of illegal drugs? The congressman walks away disdainfully and calls the reporter a name, of course.
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D, Ariz.) participated in a grandstanding press conference called by Democratic politicians in Arizona to protest the new law, which allows law enforcement to ask for proof of legal status when they lawfully encounter a person and they have reasonable suspicion that the person might be in the country illegally. After the press conference, a reporter from CNSnews.com asks Rep. Grijalva: “Are you committed to sealing the border against the influx of illegal drugs?”
It should be noted that Rep. Grijalva’s district includes 300 miles of the US/Mexican border. For Grijalva to ask “What does this have to do with our press conference today?” in relation to the reporter’s question about drug trafficking, we’re forced to wonder if Rep. Grijalva actually understands the law he is protesting.
Tom Tancredo’s muy caliente remarks at the recent National Tea Party Convention, in Nashville, outed MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow as a race-baiting demagogue.
Here’s what the former Colorado congressman said: “Mostly because, I think, that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country, people, people who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed, socialist ideologue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
Here’s what Maddow said (after denigrating Tancredo as a “failed presidential candidate” and a “professional anti-immigrant”):
Just for reference here, when Tom Tancredo talks about literacy tests, that`s what they used in the south to keep black people from voting before civil rights legislation and court rulings put a stop to that. So the national tea party convention opened with a clarion call to bring back the literacy tests for voting. And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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