Transnational Narco-Terrorist Threat At The Border

The National Terror Alert calls our attention to a disturbing and potentially dangerous scenario at the southern border as detailed in a series of reports by Homeland Security Today. The threat assessment involves warring rival drug cartels in Mexico, the rise of Islamist extremism in Latin America, and an alleged alliance between jihadists, drug cartels, and conventional street gangs. According to one expert cited in the material, "the nexus between gangs, other transnational criminal organizations and Islamic fundamentalists is what gangs do and have done for centuries...gangs acting as carriers, security escorts, moving currency, and acting as 'enforcers' is also what gangs do and have done for centuries." Click here to read the entire series of articles.

At the same time, according to AP, "U.S. law officers who work the border are being charged with criminal corruption in numbers not seen before, as drug and immigrant smugglers use money and sometimes sex to buy protection, and internal investigators crack down."

Something Fishy Going On

Obama supporter Camille Paglia, the scholar and culture critic, insists she has no buyer's remorse but still concludes that the healthcare reform effort is a "clunker":

Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

Paglia is amazed how the tribunes of civil liberties became mute despite fishy White House privacy invasions:

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

Along similar lines, media pundit Monica Crowley detects the new-found disrespect by the ruling party in Washington for grassroots activities:

It is laughably absurd for liberals to attack Americans for exercising their First Amendment rights, when they have organized the following: massive protests that shut down college campuses and, indeed, entire cities during the Vietnam War; marched en masse during the nuclear-freeze movement in the 1980s; organized corporate shakedowns to force race-based initiatives; set up a lawn-chair village outside President George W. Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch during the Iraq war -- and disrupted congressional hearings, got in the face (literally) of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and called Gen. David H. Petraeus "General Betray Us"; and orchestrated nationwide vote fraud by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. (I could go on, but The Washington Times is only so many pages long.)

So the masters of the organized protest hate it when protesters organize against them.

Voter ID Required for Town Hall--But Not To Vote

The artist formerly known as Stuart Smalley and many other politicians elected by slim margins often owe their narrow election victories to "voter outreach"--i.e., ballot fraud by ACORN and other community organizers as facilitated by ethically compromised state officials themselves elected through the Soros-funded Secretary of State Project.

In general, Democrats really come apart at the seams in response to common-sense proposals to require showing a photo ID to vote. They usually block legislation to that effect in state houses where they hold the majority.

Even Mexico, among many other countries, has a more secure voting process than the U.S.

Last year, Democrats even went all the way to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful bid to set aside an innocuous Indiana photo ID law.

So now NewsBusters reports that a Democrat lawmaker, Rep. Eugene Green of Texas, who opposes photo ID for federal elections, is nonetheless insisting on a photo ID to gain entry to his town hall meetings. This is, of course to verify that attendees live in his district. In other words, you need to bring an ID to talk to him, but not to vote for him.

What's wrong with this "picture"?