Drug Smuggler Gets Less Prison Time Than Border Agents
Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean received longer sentences than the illegal alien drug smuggler they were trying to stop.
The Mexican drug smuggler who testified against the two Border Patrol agents who shot him near the Mexican border was sentenced Wednesday to nine and a half years in federal prison. That's a shorter sentence than either of the agents received.
Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila received two consecutive 57-month sentences for smuggling almost 800 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. in September and October of 2005. During that time, he had immunity from prosecution for an earlier smuggling episode -- the one where he was shot by Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.
In February 2005, Compean shot 14 times at the fleeing illegal alien drug smuggler, but he missed. Ramos shot once and hit Aldrete-Davila in the buttocks before the wounded smuggler made it back across the Mexican border.
Aldrete-Davila had been trying to sneak 743 pounds of marijuan into Fabens, Texas, near El Paso when the agents spotted him.
Ramos and Compean were sentenced to 11 and 12 years, respectively, for discharging a weapon in the commission of a crime of violence. A federal appeals court upheld the border Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean received longer sentences than the illegal alien drug smuggler they were trying to stop.
The Mexican drug smuggler who testified against the two Border Patrol agents who shot him near the Mexican border was sentenced Wednesday to nine and a half years in federal prison. That's a shorter sentence than either of the agents received.
Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila received two consecutive 57-month sentences for smuggling almost 800 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. in September and October of 2005. During that time, he had immunity from prosecution for an earlier smuggling episode -- the one where he was shot by Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.
In February 2005, Compean shot 14 times at the fleeing illegal alien drug smuggler, but he missed. Ramos shot once and hit Aldrete-Davila in the buttocks before the wounded smuggler made it back across the Mexican border.
Aldrete-Davila had been trying to sneak 743 pounds of marijuan into Fabens, Texas, near El Paso when the agents spotted him.
Ramos and Compean were sentenced to 11 and 12 years, respectively, for discharging a weapon in the commission of a crime of violence. A federal appeals court upheld the border agents' conviction last week. Both agents said they thought the smuggler had a gun, but if he did, it was never found.
A man is arrested for making threats against Obama, CNN ignores his threats against Pres. Bush
I can only speculate as to why the media would remove the threat against Bush in these accounts. Is it because it is harder to portray Obama as the victim when he isn't the only one threatened, or just harder to sell the meme that the offender is probably a murderous racist when he threatens a white president as well?The fraudulent ways of ACORN (Obama's old 'community organizer' organization) continue nationwide with...public funding!
After 3-4 hours of letting half-truths percolate to establish the narrative, CNN then they filled in the rest of the story, after the damage was done.
They could have posted the correct story, the entire story, before 4:00 PM. CNN posted only part of the story, allowing paranoia, biases, and dark fantasies to fester. All of these raging emotions would have been muted, if not eliminated, if it was revealed what CNN know for the beginning, which was the fact that Bush was also a target of Geisel's rage.
Barack Obama's taxpayer-subsidized old friends at ACORN have been very, very busy lately. And ACORN Watch is here to give you the rundown on all the latest shenanigans on your dime.The 'stimulus' didn't stimulate anything (except our national debt!)
* In Milwaukee, election officials are investigating fake names registered by ACORN workers
* In New Mexico, it's the same old story of ACORN using criminals to lead voter registration drives.
* In Florida, William Amos points to an ACORN-assisted woman with no job who secured a $42,000 loan on a house that she can't figure out how to pay.
* Last year in Washington, felony charges were filed against several paid employees and supervisors of ACORN.
* In March of 2008, an ACORN worker was sentenced in Berks County Pennsylvania to 146 days to 23 months in the county prison for making 29 phony voter-registration forms to collect a cash bonus from ACORN.
* Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder, Wade Rathke, embezzled nearly $1 million from Acorn and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000 but a small group of executives decided to keep the information from almost all of the group's board members and not to alert law enforcement.
* As of July 2008, at least three ACORN workers have been convicted of voter fraud in Kansas City, and one is awaiting trial.
* St. Louis, Mo., officials found that in 2006 over 1,000 addresses listed on its registrations did not exist.
* The Consumers Rights League reports that ACORN used taxpayer money to support "corporate shakedown tactics, counseling of potential homebuyers to use "undocumented" or "under the table" income to obtain mortgages, and to assist in obtaining mortgages for undocumented workers.
Congress enacted the tax rebate program earlier this year because it perceived a growing risk of recession. In addition, it feared monetary policy alone would not be effective because of the dysfunctional credit markets. As American taxpayers know, most of the rebate checks have now been mailed and cashed.
Those of us who supported this fiscal package reasoned that the program would boost consumer confidence as well as available cash. We hoped the combination would cause households to spend a substantial fraction of the rebate dollars, leading to more production and employment. An optimistic and influential study by economists at the Brookings Institution projected that each dollar of revenue loss would increase real GDP by more than a dollar if households spent at least 50 cents of every rebate dollar.
The evidence is now in and that optimism was unwarranted. Recent government statistics show that only between 10% and 20% of the rebate dollars were spent. The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending. This experience confirms earlier studies showing that one-time tax rebates are not a cost-effective way to increase economic activity.
Judicial tyranny and environmental stupidityLynn Moses will be locked up in federal prison next Wednesday. His crime? Protecting the city of Driggs, Idaho from flooding. [...]
Presiding federal judge Lynn Winmill, who has a well-deserved reputation for judicial activism, refused to allow Teton County commissioners to testify to the original agreement, nor would he allow the aggressive Corps staffer to testify about the refusal of the U.S. Attorney to prosecute in the mid-90s.
Before the jury was dismissed to enter into deliberations at the conclusion of his trial, Judge Lynn Winmill instructed the jury, believe it or not, to disregard every bit of information from 1980 to 2002, including the Corps' denial of jurisdiction and the mandate from local government for Mr. Moses to maintain the flood channel.
Instructed by this notoriously activist judge to ignore facts, reason and legal history, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, finding Mr. Moses guilty of "discharging" "pollutants" into one of the "waters of the United States."
His conviction ignores the fact that no evidence was ever presented in court that Mr. Moses "discharged" anything into the stream bed at all. He only removed sand and gravel bars that were already there and which he was contractually obligated to remove. He was extracting material from the channel, not discharging material into it.
Read the whole thing and keep in mind that Judge B. Lynn Winmill is a 1995 Bill Clinton appointee.
More Gore eco-hypocrisyBarack Obama wants us all to turn down our thermostats, get rid of our SUVs, and monitor each other's tire pressure to conserve energy and rescue the planet. How about going after the lavish consumption of his fellow purported eco-warriors?
Let's start with Green Messiah Al Gore's massive boat outside Nashville. It's docked at Hurricane Marina on Center Hill Lake in Smithville, about an hour east of Nashville.
Steve Gill has the goods on Gore's "Bio-Solar One"–which is supposed to be environmentally acceptable because it's biodiesel-fueled and solar-powered.
[The funniest part of this one is that the boat's official name is 'Bio-Solar One'. That's right: BS1! You just can't make this stuff up!]
U.S. economic future threatened by entitlements
Peter Orszag is no conservative ideologue. The head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution before being picked for his current position by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Yet, Mr. Orszag recently warned that the rising cost of federal entitlement programs, particularly Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, poses a grave threat to America's economic future.
According to Mr. Orszag, without dramatic reform, the cost of those three programs alone will rise from 18 percent of GDP today to 28 percent by the middle of this century and as much as 35 percent soon thereafter.
That means that just three federal government programs will be consuming between a quarter and a third of everything this country produces.
Paying for those programs would require raising both the corporate tax rate and top income tax rate from their current 35 percent to 88 percent, the current 25 percent tax rate for middle-income workers to 63 percent, and the 10 percent tax bracket for low-income workers to 25 percent. The impact on workers, businesses and the economy at large would be catastrophic.
Tyson drops Labor Day in favor of Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr
Workers at Tyson Foods' poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day, but will instead take the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in the fall.
A recent press release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) stated that a new contract at the Shelbyville facility "implements a new holiday to accommodate the ... Muslim workers at the plant."
The RWDSU stated that "the five-year contract creates an additional paid holiday, Iidal Fitil, a Muslim holiday that occurs toward the end of Ramadan." Eid al-Fitr falls on Oct. 1 this year.
Tyson's Director of Media Relations, Gary Mickelson, stated that while the new contract does not provide an additional holiday, as the union claimed, "the new contract includes eight paid holidays, which is the same number provided in the old contract."
"However, the union leadership did request and receive Eid al-Fitr (which is apparently spelled various ways including Id al-Fitr and Eid ul-Fitr) as a paid holiday in place of Labor Day," Mickelson confirmed in an e-mail to the T-G.
Osama bin Laden's driver gets 6-month sentence
This is actually much worse than I thought, and I apologize to readers for an error on my part, about which I'll have more to say in an article tomorrow.
Basically, I misunderstood the commission sentencing procedure. I thought the jury (a panel of six military officers in Hamdan's case) made a recommendation but that the sentence imposed was ultimately up to the judge. In fact, sentence in commission cases is imposed by the jury (see here for the commission rules). The military judge's role at sentencing is limited to making corrections if the jury sentences outside the scope of legal authority (e.g., if the jury imposes 30 years for a crime that carries only a 10-year sentence), and, more importantly for present purposes, to decide such matters as whether any time the defendant has already served gets counted against the sentence imposed by the jury.
So here, the military officers on the jury somehow decided that material support to our enemies, by a guy who actually protected bin Laden and transported weapons for al Qaeda, was worth only 5 1/2 years in jail; then the judge made matters incalculably worse by effectively giving Hamdan what everyone (including the judge) must know will be taken as a get-out-of-jail card: i.e., full credit for the 5 years Hamdan has already been in custody as an enemy combatant.
This turns the jury's disgraceful 66-month sentence into a shocking 6-month sentence. Someone may be able to defend that, but I can't.
The list, of course, goes on and on. So, what's my point in sharing all of these things that are just plain wrong (admit it, you got a gut feeling as you were reading this that they're wrong, didn't you)? The point is to show that each and every one of these things is the result of the failed policies of liberalism. Of course, there are people involved in each situation, and it is the decisions and actions of those people that have made these things come about. But, their decisions and actions are largely the result of the creep of liberalism in our society. Judicial activism, illegal immigration, political correctness, capitulation to Islamic radicalism, environmentalism, economic stupidity through higher taxes and rampant entitlements...They're all different dishes on the same liberal buffet.
We need to understand what liberalism is, what it does to people, and what its end results are...before things like this occur, so these things can be prevented. That goal is the point of this blog, and so many others out there. It's up to you to decide what philosophies you live by, and who you support for this nation's leadership. Do you want to be led by people who favor the policies that have brought us the things listed above? If so, your clear choice is Barack the Obamessiah and the Democrat party.
There's my two cents.
No comments:
Post a Comment