Answering Dust, and other new readers

Dust is a commenter and apparently a new reader somehow connected to the mess in Bowling Green, KY who can’t refrain from name-calling of someone she/he disagrees with (not us, but another commenter), so I won’t be posting her (I’m assuming this is a woman) comment of yesterday. However, she says something to the effect that ”all of a sudden we want an investigation of how refugees are cared for” and that’s how I know she is new to RRW.

Thanks Dust for reminding me that since our readership is going through the roof, we should from time to time clarify for new readers our guiding principles here at RRW.  

I don’t want to write a book because I have a dozen more interesting pieces of news to write about today and this is voluntary work—call it a charitable contribution from Judy and Ann (me) every day—so I don’t have much time.   These are my reasons (in no particular order) for writing this blog, Judy might have some additions or subtractions, but she is away.

You will see that most of our posts focus on these themes:

*First, Dust, we have been calling for an investigation of the refugee resettlement program from the very beginning, ever since we saw refugees placed in slum buildings where we live more than 3 years ago.  Because there is a ‘presumption of good intentions’ almost no one reports problems with the program—certainly not the mainstream media.

* As a conservative I don’t believe the government should be taking money from citizens and giving it with virtually no oversight to non-profit groups and churches.  Funding your charitable causes is not a function of government.  Real charity, Dust, is for you to put your time and money into caring for people—immigrants, refugees or other impoverished people—not badgering others to do so or taking (stealing!) their money to redistribute it to others.

* Refugee families should be individually sponsored by churches or other groups in a truly charitable endeavor, and we should not take more families than we can take care of.  There are millions of refugees in the world and we will be only able to take so many, so we should be doing it right.

Let me remind you of what that Iraqi refugee boy said in Arizona last year, here.

It is better to have 10 Iraqi refugees who are satisfied with their lives than having 100 angry ones with no life at all.

* There needs to be a national debate about how many refugees and other immigrants we take and from what cultures they come.  Frankly, we have made a grievous error in taking the Muslim refugees, Somalis in particular, who have no intention of becoming Americans.  They are here to change America.  Unfortunately, political correctness and a worshipful attitude toward multiculturalism have blinded us.  The explosion on this front is yet to come and it will be like the Major Hasan slaughter at Ft. Hood and there will be much fingerpointing and gnashing of teeth about who is to blame primarily at the US State Department.

It is my view, that the ‘diversity is strength’ line is way overused, and mostly hogwash. 

* Again, and we have said this on many occasions, we should have a debate about who comes to America and how many, but once they are here (and until there is some sensible reform of the program), these agencies contracted to resettle the refugees better darn well do their jobs.  Dust, we have written over 2500 posts since July 2007 and hundreds of them involve refugee resettlement agencies who have left refugees in the lurch, Bowling Green is just one more in a long line.

*  The refugee resettlement program has become a bureaucracy where agencies, both government and non-profit, need to protect jobs, buy buildings, expand “services,” and like any other government-funded industry they have in my opinion forgotten their original mission.

*  In that national debate about how many refugees we take, there needs to be a realistic discussion about the impact of the increased number of people on our natural resources (air, water, energy), how many schools, houses, cars etc. will be needed and what impact will that have on open space and quality of life.

*  It is wrong to bring refugees to the US and have some insider deals with large industries, like the meatpackers, for cheap labor especially when apparently the refugees are not told the full story abroad.  If the volags (short for voluntary agencies that are really taxpayer funded resettlement agencies, so the word ‘voluntary’ is a misnomer) are making deals with industry, then let’s get it out in the open instead of hiding behind that presumption of good intentions.   Also, Dust, do you think it’s fair for unemployed Americans to have to compete with people who have government-funded employment agencies scouting jobs for them as the refugees do?

*  And, it makes no sense to bring in tens of thousands of refugees and place them on welfare and other public assistance either, unless of course you are a proponent of the Cloward-Piven/Alinsky strategy of bringing about crisis to crash our form of government.   As a matter of fact, I have joked previously that if the refugees came to the US and all registered as Republicans, this program would end overnight!

* This is getting too long, but I must make this point.  The program must be reformed, it is crumbling in the on-going recession, there will be more Bowling Greens.  One major reform I want to see is that local communities that will be receiving refugees be completely and thoroughly informed of the good and bad aspects of the program.  They should have the whole truth laid out.  If the program is good the public will accept it, but if the volags and the federal government can’t sell it (with all the facts on the table!) to the community then the community shouldn’t have to accept any refugees.  We help bring facts to citizens of those communities.

* We also educate with articles from around the world on refugees, so readers know what is happening elsewhere.

Sorry, this got much longer than I intended, but one final thing.  Judy and I don’t care what you call us!   Some of you reading this have for way too long intimidated and silenced people you disagree with by calling them racists, xenophobes, hatemongers and on and on and on.  It doesn’t work here, in fact, when you start with that sort of attack and don’t address the issues we raise, it validates our work.

In fact, Dust, it might be better that you spend your time helping reform the program and caring for individual refugees, rather than attacking the messengers.  But, if it makes you feel better, attack us, afterall, that is a large part of what this program is all about—feeling good about oneself.

Addendum from Judy: I can’t add much to Ann’s good post, but I want to say that some of what we do is connecting the dots. Ann, especially, does a lot of investigative reporting where she shows how the meatpacking firms are involved in refugee resettlement, or various people in the refugee resettlement “game” are doing very well out of it. There is real news in the refugee resettlement area that very few if any mainstream journalists are touching. I expect that at some point the refugee issue will blow up big, and perhaps reporters will then turn to our archives to find out some background.

We also connect the refugee issue with larger ideological, political and international issues, such as Saul Alinsky’s tactics or the incredible double standard and political motives regarding the Palestinian refugees.

Regarding comments, again!

We prefer factual responses to posts, but we welcome your opinions too, however….

We screen our comments, so to all of you who can’t comment without calling someone names or using foul language, don’t waste your time writing a comment.  

Also, as I have said on many previous occasions, we don’t live at the computer.  So, there will be times when comments sit unread and unposted for several hours or overnight before we get to them.  Have patience, but if you are name-calling or cursing, forget it!  You will be waiting for a very long time.

We are not a resettlement agency, we are a blog

I wish I didn’t have to state this again and I do feel sorry for all the people who are writing and wanting us to help them get into the US or to help with their immigration problems.  We are merely a blog, we are a news outlet about issues involving refugees and immigrants.  

We are not connected to the government and no one pays us for our work.  Our work is entirely voluntary.

On the right column, note that just before one logs in to comment we have stated that clearly—-that we are not a resettlement agency, yet we increasingly receive comments from around the world that are really pleas for help.  I am sorry, we cannot post those.

AIM conference dissects Obama, media, global warming and more

As Ann told you on Friday, she and I attended a conference put on by AIM, Accuracy in Media, to celebrate their 40th anniversary on Friday.  As bloggers we got a free pass. I’m pleased to see that “journalists and bloggers” are a category now, in the eyes of many. It was a packed schedule, one speaker after another, and most of them were very good. Here’s a brief summary:

Cliff Kincaid, AIM’s editor, went through some influences on Obama’s thinking, including Frank Marshall Davis, a mentor and black role model to the young Barack Obama. He was a Communist who was under surveillance by the FBI. Kincaid introduced Trevor Loudon, somebody Ann and I were excited to see.

Trevor Loudon is a New Zealander whose blog is at http://newzeal.blogspot.com/. If you’ve never heard of him it’s because our media are so timid; because Loudon had the scoop on Obama’s leftist past in great detail all during the presidential campaign, when most journalists refused to look into Obama’s background and ideology at all. Glenn Beck discovered him, though, and used his material extensively.

Trevor Loudon pointed out that the left’s goal is to infiltrate and take over mainstream institutions. To see what the Democratic Party will do next, read the People’s Weekly World or another Communist newsspaper, because that’s where the radical-left-controlled Dems get their agenda.

Asked about upcoming revelations, Loudon said he has a lot more on staffers in the Obama administration. In addition, he will write about foreign involvement in the Obama campaign and administration. In answer to a question from Ann, he said that the Apollo Alliance (a group covered extensively by Glenn Beck and others) was formed to unite the labor and environmental movements, who were often at odds. The notion of Green Jobs is a tactic to suck working-class people into the radical movement. Did you know $500 million of the stimulus bill was earmarked for green jobs? I didn’t, though I note that last week a woman I know who is still in an electrician’s training course was snapped up by a solar energy company less than 24 hours after she sent in her resume.

Andy McCarthy spoke about the administration and the left’s attack on the CIA and on the war on terror. He said the Department of Justice is obsessed with partisan concerns. If there is an attack on the U.S. there will be a lot of questions asked about why this could happen.

A panel on global warming was interesting. The moderator said they had tried to get somebody who believed in man-made global warming for the panel but couldn’t. So we heard from three others: Marc Morano is a science writer and former advisor to Senator James Inhofe. His website is http://www.climatedepot.com/. He gave us this amazing quote from our own Senator Ben Cardin, who called cap and trade “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time.”

Ann McElhenney, maker of a new documentary film about the global warming, Not Evil Just Wrong, a refutation of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.  Her next project is a film showing the indoctrination of children into environmental radicalism in schools, and she asked for the public to send her examples.

Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher, gave a dizzying array of facts showing how wrong the conventional wisdom is on global warming, and also how persecuted those are who try to present the truth.  He said we are going from the age of enlightenment into a new dark age. His YouTube clips are here. All three panelists were very knowledgeable as well as entertaining. 

Tony Blankley, former White House policy analyst for Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich’s press secretary when he was Speaker of the House, spoke at lunch. He said he was shocked at the media during the presidential campaign. Not for their leftism, which is no surprise, but their lack of shame at their open lack of objectivity. Journalism school used to teach that there was an adversary relationship between the media and government officials, but that no longer seems to obtain.

Blankley sees the democratic nature of the digital media as a good sign. The left and the right will unite to defend the freedom of the Internet.

Next was a panel on ACORN. Anita MonCrief, former ACORN employee and whistleblower, told her personal story. She was working with a New York Times reporter during the 2008 campaign, but the editors killed the story which would have been published shortly before the election. She is being sued for $5 million by Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate. Her story and her defense fund are here.

Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He pointed out that the widely publicized congressional cutoff of ACORN’s funding was only a temporary measure that expires October 31. He related ways to deal with ACORN legislatively and judicially. Members of Congress have issued reports and called on the Department of Justice to investigate, but this will not happen in the Obama administration. There are several bills in Congress to defund ACORN now and in the future.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, longtime reporter on election fraud, talked about how ACORN could have gotten away with so much for so long. He said it as based on racial guilt, even though ACORN is actually like a plantation, with a few white people at the top making a lot of money, and lots of blacks at the bottom doing the grunt work for low pay. He said this might be a situation where a special prosecutor is needed that is independent of the administration.

We stayed for one more speaker, Jonah Goldberg of National Review and author of the excellent best-seller Liberal Fascism. He titled his talk “Two Cheers for Incivility” and pointed out that much of what the left bemoans as incivility is actually just criticism of their policies. He is optimistic about the future for conservatives and points out that the insults hurled at the right are signs of the panic and desperation of the media.

He said that for a while journalists all wanted to be opinion commentators, but there is a shift to wanting to report facts. There is a big market for new facts. The team that uncovered the ACORN outrages posing as a prostitute and a pimp, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, are admired by young people. Some think they’re great, but many more think they’re cool, and that is probably more important.

We left after that, missing the final panel on the New Media and the Future of Journalism. It seems to be on a C-SPAN website, here.

It was a good day, and my main criticism is that it was so poorly attended that those at AIM responsible for that should be horsewhipped. It would have been easy to fill up the room with young journalist or congressional staff if anyone had put a little thought and work into it. I’ve only seen a little of it on C-SPAN, so I don’t know if the cameras panned the sparsely-populated audience as they often do. But since it is on C-SPAN, presumably it will get seen by many more people, as it should.

Just one more bit to make the obvious connection to this blog. We are part of the new media, and coverage of the downside of refugee resettlement is almost nonexistent in the mainstream media. We are one little piece of the new ability of citizens to present information that sometimes finds its way into public consciousness and sometimes even makes it into larger media outlets.

Away today

We are away today and one of us will give you a full accounting (or at least a partial one) when we return.   Suffice it to say it should be a good day and we are very much looking forward to it.

Just a reminder for new readers, we review our comments before posting them so especially while we are away  it can be hours before we get a chance to do that.   We post most of them.   However, since I’m on the subject, we don’t post the ones from people around the world telling us their refugee stories and asking for help getting into the US.  We have no connection to the government or the NGO’s in the resettlement business.

Comment worth noting: ‘Mad in Maine’ wants to know what she can do

In response to my post this morning about another immigrant food stamp scam, this one in Utica, NY, here.    Frustrated ‘Mad in Maine,’ a lady we met a few days ago (here), is asking what she can do.

Back again and getting Madder in Maine.

We’ll pay for public defenders and use tax dollars to keep them in jail/prison. Our tax dollars are probably the money they’re going to use to bail out as well. I say send them home. If they can’t follow the rules here, they shouldn’t be here. I have to follow the rules.

This is another thing that’s really grating my cheese today. I have to budget $100 for our weekly shopping trip that will include groceries for the next week (and hopefully a few things I can put in the freezer for upcoming meals), toiletries, paper products (toilet paper, as I refuse to use leaves even in Maine) and cleaning and maintenance products. I’ve heard of some refugees (of all nationalities) using food stamps to buy grocery items that they then turn over to the resturants and shops their families/friends/neighbors own, to ultimately sell back to us!!

Mortgage payment due, car insurance due, electric bill due…I still haven’t turned the furnace on though.
And I’m about to lose another part on my old car…hopefully it will hold out until next payday.

I guess I have a really big question: Is there anything I can do to help put a stop to all of this?

Mad in Maine

First, I don’t think any one person can stop all this, look at ACORN for example, people have been investigating the fraud there for years and finally it took one daring effort by a couple of brave young people to finally push the whole issue into the mainstream.  Few of us are going to become James O’keefes or Hannah Giles, but we can do our  little bit within the framework of our lives.   My first admonition to ‘Mad’ and everyone else, is to find your role and focus like a laser on it.   I don’t know you, ‘Mad in Maine’, or what sort of person you are or how much time you have so these suggestions are for you and all of our other angry and frustrated readers to think about.

1) Write a blog.  Don’t just run your mouth with your opinions, but pick a topic and become an expert on the topic (you can still throw out your opinions!).  Research and provide a service to your readers.  Eventually, if you are patient, what you do will have an impact.  You could for instance write a blog about welfare/food stamp/home health care fraud in Maine, or the whole US.  Or, write a blog about immigration issues in Maine.  There is enough material out there for that for sure!  And, there are very few real investigative reporters anymore, so this is a sorely needed job.

Don’t be deterred by computer technology.  Blogs like this one are really simple and free.  Oh, and one more thing.  To fit blogging into your life, you can write posts as often as your schedule allows.

2)  Get involved in local and state politics.  Goodness knows you have a couple of US Senators in Maine who need their backbones stiffened from time to time.   I don’t know what city you live in, or are near, but you could get involved there too.

3)  Write letters to the editor.  I was at a meeting this past weekend and a few people told me they set google alerts for some topic (like illegal immigration) and then when they see an article, even in another state, they write a letter to the editor in response.

4)  Join a group that is fighting for the same things you are, and become involved enough to run a local chapter.  Maybe a local Tea Party, Beck’s 9/12 Project, Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and so forth.

5)  I know some people who have built e-mail lists and they send out articles daily to their lists on given topics.

6)  Here is a suggestion for the ’skulker’ personality.  Pick a subject that you are personally passionate about.  I’m thinking more about local type issues.   Dig into documents, use the Freedom of Information Act or your states open government laws, attend meetings of groups you oppose or are promoting what you object to, and basically gather information to make a case someday to expose the whole corrupt business–whatever it is.

7)  If you are someone most comfortable in a circle of local people, get together with others who have the same concerns and jointly make a plan for what you can do.

Those are just a few ideas.  But, I need to emphasize again, don’t get frustrated if you can’t work at this every minute of the day. Don’t be a gadfly either.  Pick your project, focus and know that you are doing your little piece to save America.  I hope that helps!

I’ll be traveling…

This is just a note to let all of my internet friends know I will be away for a few days and likely will not have internet access.  I enjoy getting your e-mail communications and just didn’t want you to think I was simply not responding.   I should be back on-line by Thursday evening.  Ann

American newspapers deceive foreign media, and they don’t like it

Mark Steyn has a post on The Corner, Don’t Blame Us, Blame the Newspaper We Copied It Out Of, that deserves attention.

The USS Neverdock notices an emerging global trend: newspapers suckered by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Down under, the Sydney Morning Herald has retracted its “original” “report” of the Van Jones resignation:

A week ago, the Herald ran a story which, in its essence, was not true. The paper did not know this. It was the unwitting victim of a distortion created at The Washington Post, which produced the original story. 

We’ve commented frequently on reports in the media that leave out the most relevant and interesting facts. Ann has posted on any number of puff pieces on refugees in local newspapers in which the reporters don’t or won’t look below the surface. Those who do real reporting are heroes, and we’ve given them lots of space, most notably Brian Mosely and the Shelbyville (Tennesee) Times-Gazette.

Mark Steyn mentions a second retraction, this one from the Irish Times which was snookered by a New York Times story. And here’s his perceptive bottom line:

Of course, neither the Sydney Morning Herald nor the Irish Times are “unwitting victims” of the Washington Post and New York Times. It’s their choice to copy blindly any slab of hooey appearing in the Post and Times that happens to suit their prejudices without checking it for themselves. As the Neverdock points out, if you can’t do as well as some blogger using Google, maybe you shouldn’t be in the news business.

That’s exactly right. We get most of our information here at Refugee Resettlement Watch from poking around the Internet. Once we got started, of course we began getting information directly from people in the know, so that in some ways we became somewhat more like traditional reporters. (I should say Ann is, since I don’t do much original reporting.)

When you look at all the recent stories that the mainstream media have ignored or minimized, you do have to wonder why these media outlets exist at all. The Van Jones scandal and resignation, the undercover films of ACORN employees encouraging what they thought was a brothel using underaged girls, the huge Washington march on Saturday — these were covered well and thoroughly by websites, bloggers and Fox News — and little else.

Blogger power! The blogger who first spotted Communist Van Jones is from New Zealand

Update September 11th:  After reading this post go to Family Security Matters and learn more about “coercive utopians,” here.

I’m going to keep nagging my friends and fellow freedom fighters to start their own blogs and dig for the facts and expose them because the mainstream media has given up its investigative role leaving the job wide open.   Keith Olbermann has announced he is going after Glenn Beck over the Van Jones affair but it seems to me that he will have a heck of a time going after every blogger around the world.   The guy who first discovered self-avowed revolutionary Van Jones is from New Zealand!   Thank you Trevor Loudon!

From Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media:

Loudon tells me, “I began to investigate Van Jones after seeing several separate pieces of information. I first came across the name in the mid 1990s in a New Zealand socialist publication which had a small clip about Van Jones-a Yale educated lawyer involved in STORM-Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement. The name stuck.“

While researching the far-left think Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which Loudon considers the Obama administration’s “ideas bank,” Loudon found a piece by IPS staffer Chuck Collins recommending Van Jones for a top government job. A September 26, 2008 article, posted on the IPS website by Chuck Collins, offered 22 names they thought would make suitable appointments for an Obama administration. He included, “Van Jones, of the Ella Baker Center, to direct the Commerce Department’s new ‘green jobs initiative.’”

Remember that this was before the election.

I’ll be adding Loudon’s New Zeal to our blogroll and start visiting daily!   Here in the US, Gateway Pundit did lots of great work on this too.

What has all this got to do with refugees and immigrants?  The Open Borders crowd is aligned completely with the Communists* (aka Progressives) now seeded throughout our government (Van Jones is the tip of the iceberg), and with the mainstream environmental groups, unions, church groups (the religious Left) resettling refugees and even some big businesses (for a full list of the Open Borders lobby, go here).  The Alinsky strategy calls for the poor and angry to be the fuel for the revolution—immigrants fit the bill nicely.   Immigrants are Alinsky’s “Have-nots” in the battle with the “Haves.”    See previous posts here and here on the subject.  For everything we have written on Alinsky go to our category ‘community destabilization’ and scroll back to the beginning.

* Readers, I’m of the age where the word Communist is almost as bad a word as, well you know!   I grew up being discouraged from even uttering the “C” word in describing anyone, but since Jones and others are now using the word about themselves, I guess its o.k. for us to use it too!  Marxist, anarchist, revolutionary are all back in use!

Everyone must write a blog! Like this one in Nashville!

Someone just now brought this great blog to my attention—it’s called ACT West Nashville.   ACT is the American Congress for Truth and Nashville is fortunate to have a very active ACT  chapter! 

It reminds me that I haven’t done my harangue recently to tell you all you must write your own blog.  They are simple to set up and you only need to write when you feel like it.  But, they are so important in gathering the FACTS especially since there are very few investigative reporters left these days.   You become the reporter!

Did you see Glenn Beck last Friday?   He told all of us to gather facts, dig through documents, look for connections and expose them without fear!   The mainstream media isn’t going to do it, so we have to! 

Great job ACT West Nashville!