That’s because, like millions of others, the would-be assassin didn’t have a criminal record and thus never posed a threat to the public, according to the feds. Like many of the illegal aliens protected by the Obama Administration the attempted bomber, 29-year-old Amine El Khalifi, came to the U.S. as a kid (“through no fault of his own” as the open borders movement says).  He could have easily qualified for discounted college tuition at a number of taxpayer-funded colleges and universities nationwide.

El Khalifi lived under the radar in Alexandria Virginia while he orchestrated attacking a number of targets, including military buildings, a Washington D.C. restaurant popular among military officials and a synagogue. Last week he planned to blow up the nation’s capitol as a suicide bomber in a martyrdom operation. El Khalifi concocted a detailed plot and believed he was working with al Qaeda. 

Incredibly, El Khalifi is the prototype of illegal immigrant protected by Obama’s backdoor amnesty plan. Officially launched in mid-November, the initiative halts the removal of illegal aliens with no criminal records. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reviews all deportation cases and operates a “training program” to assure that enforcement agents and prosecuting attorneys don’t remove certain types of illegal immigrants.

The idea, according to the administration, is to deport only undocumented aliens who have been convicted of serious crimes or pose a national security risk. That means a large class of illegal immigrants are being granted de facto amnesty, which is technically illegal without the consent of Congress. So far thousands have been spared removal under the outrageous initiative. 

As if this weren’t bad enough, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records indicate that serious criminals are not being targeted for removal either. This in addition to a sharp drop in the number of overall deportations during a recent quarter analyzed by a nonprofit university group dedicated to researching the U.S. government. 

The nonpartisan New York-based data research center, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), provides detailed information about the operation of hundreds of government agencies. Immigration is one of many areas it researches. This week TRAC released ICE data that shows the number of deportation proceedings initiated by the government during a recent quarter fell 33% from the previous quarter. 

The records also reveal that serious criminals are not being targeted as ICE promised when it announced its top enforcement priority. Of the 24,073 individuals targeted for deportation during the period analyzed, 8,884 were charged with immigration violations while only 1,300—just 3.3%—were sought to be removed as “aggravated felons,” the records show.

This is downright scary. That’s why Judicial Watch has worked to obtain information on how this is all being carried out. Last spring JW sued DHS for records concerning “deferred action” or “parole” to suspend removal proceedings against a particular group of individuals. The lawsuit was filed because the agency has ignored a federal public records request that dates back to July 2010.

A Judicial Watch probe has uncovered a letter that U.S. Senator Obama wrote in late September, 2008 to help the Chicago-based National Public Housing Museum get tens of thousands of dollars from the federal government for just one project. It’s not clear how many other federal grants the president has helped the museum score. 

The Obama-driven allocation discovered in the course of JW’s probe came in the form of a $40,000 “planning” grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a government agency that funds research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities. Its coffers are filled by the same source that provides for all other government entities; American taxpayers. 

In this case the museum used the money, earmarked for “America’s historical and cultural organizations,” to fund a special program about “resident voices of public housing.” What exactly does this mean? According to the NEH grant description: Planning for an oral history initiative to include the voices of residents of public housing and to expand the scholarly perspective on the history of public housing for the museum. 

In his letter to the NEH’s grant committee, Obama essentially orders the public housing museum’s application be given “due consideration” and that he be kept “informed of the outcome of the grant selection process.” The former Illinois senator goes on to write that the money will be used to “expand and enrich the existing humanities perspective on public housing.”

Let’s take a closer look at the facility, which opened just a few years ago as a social history museum with the important mission of recreating living spaces of public housing apartments during eight decades. The idea, according to the museum web site, is to have a “cultural asset” for social reflection, public dialogue and education. The museum also offers the history of individual public housing tenants and the social, political and economic forces that shape urban communities.

This is important because government housing has been one of the most important public policies of the 20^th century, according to those who operate this particular facility. Why Chicago for this crucial historical site? Because few cities have a more dramatic connection to public housing than Chicago and the city has been home to some of the first urban public housing efforts in the nation, including some of the most significant development for “immigrants” and “migrants.”

]]> http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/02/obama-helped-chicago-public-housing-museum-get-40k/feed/ 0 http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/02/state-web-site-tracks-mexican-cartel-violence-along-border/ http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/02/state-web-site-tracks-mexican-cartel-violence-along-border/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:00:18 +0000 Irene http://www.judicialwatch.org/?p=12695 Read the full post

It’s definitely a new era of government spending. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is allocating $20 million to “improve performance and boost the capacity of state and local governments to implement their federal block grant programs for housing and community development.” In this case the cash will support “technical assistance” projects that guide local governments trying to “stabilize” in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis.

The money will go to three types of “results-oriented technical assistance and capacity building,” according to HUD; comprehensive assistance to help grantees improve their basic program performance; limited assistance to grantees that have clearly identified program gaps; and innovative assistance to help grantees in restructuring their housing and community development programs to better meet the needs in their communities.

“These funds will help our partners work smarter and stretch federal investments for the greatest possible benefit to the people and places we serve,” said Mercedes Márquez, HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development.  “In today’s budget environment, we not only have to do more with less, we have to perform at a very high level to make certain limited taxpayer dollars have the real and lasting impact.”

Eligible applicants include state or local governments, public housing authorities, nonprofit community groups, educational institutions, Indian tribes, for-profit organizations, public or private organizations and other “intermediaries.” In other words, pretty much anyone can qualify for this particular grant.

That’s because the agency has made a “fundamental change” in the way its traditional “program-specific” technical assistance has been structured. It will be replaced with a new “cross-program” approach. What does this all mean? Nobody really knows since it’s purposely written in a mystic government lingo so regular people can’t truly understand it.

What we do know is that HUD has initiated a number of controversial programs under the Obama Administration. Last fall the agency launched a special initiative to help illegal immigrants nationwide and it intervened against Arizona’s strict immigration control law by warning that federal housing obligations prohibit “discrimination against protected class members.” HUD also deployed its assistance secretary to intercept a Fremont Nebraska measure banning illegal aliens from renting in its jurisdiction.

HUD has also been embroiled in a huge scandal surrounding federal grants awarded to the famously corrupt Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN). In 2009 Judicial Watch sued the agency for the records and in 2010 a HUD Inspector General report revealed that ACORN embezzled millions of dollars for “housing counseling” in one year alone and destroyed the documents to hide the fraud. 

Incredible but true. The huge agency—Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—created after the 2001 attacks to protect the country from terrorists, narcotics and illegal aliens is busy seizing hair dryers and perfume. In separate press releases this month, the agency brags about confiscating $51 million worth of fake perfume in fiscal year 2011 and more than 12,000 “dangerous hair dryers” at ports on opposite coasts of the country.

Americans should sleep easier at night knowing that CBP busted a ring that largely sold a “Sex in the City” brand of perfume named after a popular cable television series. These sorts of counterfeit perfumes are a form of theft from the brand owner and protecting American intellectual property is a priority for CBP, the agency says in its announcement. In addition to the economic harm, the agency further says, counterfeit perfumes are also often contaminated with unknown chemicals that can cause serious injury.

The “unsafe” hair dryer offenders were recently apprehended at ports in Los Angeles and Miami. They look like regular blow dryers and come in pink, red and a zebra print, according to pictures included in the federal announcement. The dryers were confiscated because they were determined to constitute a “substantial product hazard” under U.S. law for failing to have adequate immersion protection. They were previously identified through a nationwide targeting operation by a special CBP unit dedicated to such matters.

An agency spokesman explained the importance of such missions, saying that the vigilance of CBP officers at ports of entry will help ensure that products like hair dryers are safe for consumers. Keeping those defective blow dryers from reaching store shelves is hardly a cause for celebration at an agency that’s charged with guarding the nation’s borders and ports of entry from real threats.

CBP was created after 9/11 as the unified border agency by combining the inspectional and border forces of U.S. Customs, U.S. Immigration, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services and the U.S. Border Patrol. The idea was to create a powerful force that would effectively protect America’s borders.

Instead, CBP has been rocked by numerous scandals involving corrupt agents at airports, seaports and checkpoints along the southern border. They include officers working in different parts of the Mexican border accepting bribes from human and drug smugglers and an officer at a Florida airport charged with assisting a drug smuggling ring by tapping into sensitive federal databases. Officers throughout the agency have been charged with trafficking drugs, taking money for migrant smuggling, witness tampering and embezzlement.

In the meantime heavily armed Mexican drug cartels have transformed the southern border into a war zone and record amounts of narcotics are entering the U.S., according to various federal and news reports. The crisis is so severe that a border-state congressman who chairs a Homeland Security committee held a special hearing last May to address the matter.

It’s a government-wide call to end Islamophobia, if you will. A few months after the White House ordered an investigation of government counterterrorism training, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has destroyed instructional material that characterizes Muslims as prone to violence or terrorism.

So far 700 pages of documents from about 300 presentations given to agents since the 2001 terrorist attacks have been purged, according to a news report published this week. The White House order came after the same publication reported in late November that the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ) and Pentagon taught employees that mainstream Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the death star.

Last year Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that anti-Muslim instructional materials hurt the country’s fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. As a result of this mentality, the Joint Chiefs of Staff was asked to collect counterterrorism training materials at all military academies and academic centers such as the National Defense Intelligence College and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center. The goal, evidently, is to banish any material that could be viewed as offensive to Muslims.

To fulfill the mission the FBI enlisted the Army Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to purge material that conflates terrorism with mainstream Islam, according to inside information cited in the news report. The cleansing also includes a White House review on any information related to “cultural awareness” training for troops that were preparing to deploy to the Middle East.

This appears to be part of a wider Muslim outreach effort on the part of the Obama Administration and the president’s allies in Congress. Last spring, for instance, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee quietly scheduled a special hearing to better protect Muslim civil rights in America. Organized by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the event came in “response to the spike in anti-Muslim bigotry” and marked the first ever congressional hearing on Muslim civil rights.

Other Muslim outreach efforts under Obama include; Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano meeting to discuss national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations, the nation’s space agency (NASA) being ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing a special order to allow the reentry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S.

The president also sent an America-bashing mosque leader (Feisal Abdul Rauf) who blames U.S. foreign policy for the 9/11 attacks on a Middle Eastern outreach mission and ordered a government-funded meal program for home-bound seniors to offer halal cuisine prepared according to Islamic law.

The alarming figures were published this week in a report issued by the non-partisan Pew Center on States. It reveals that approximately 24 million active voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or have significant inaccuracies. The problem, apparently, is an outdated registration system that can’t properly maintain records.

While this madness goes on, the Obama Administration is spending resources to legally challenging state voter identification laws—similar to one already upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court—that could help fix the crisis. More than a dozen states have passed measures requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls and the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched a campaign to challenge them all, asserting that they’re discriminatory because many minorities are too poor or too ignorant to get a valid ID.

Last month Texas struck back, suing the DOJ in federal court for blocking the implementation of a state voter ID law passed by the legislature in 2011 to deter and detect election fraud. Under the Federal Voting Rights Act, the DOJ must approve changes to election laws in certain states and Texas is among them. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has been waiting for the DOJ preclearance since last July, but the feds continue stalling, essentially blocking the law’s implementation.

Preserving the integrity of the election process has been a huge issue for Judicial Watch over the years. Just last week JW launched the 2012 Election Integrity Project to pressure states and localities to clean up voter registration polls in order to comply with Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). A lengthy JW investigation of public records indicates that voter rolls in numerous states have more registered voters than voting-age population.

Among the states that appear to contain names of individuals who are ineligible to vote are Florida, California, Texas, Colorado, Ohio, Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana and West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Missouri. This month JW sent warning letters to election officials in Indiana and Ohio as well as letters of inquiry to Florida and California officials as part of the probe into their problematic voting lists.

They all took turns bashing President Barack Obama and, like good politicians, vowed to make huge changes if they get elected to the White House. Attendees at the three-day conference heard from Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Their respective messages, delivered in the main ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, were not all that different.

Bolton’s was. On Saturday morning the former George W. Bush diplomat distinguished himself by focusing on foreign policy and emphasizing that Obama’s attempt to court the Muslim Brotherhood could lead to an Islamic dictatorship in Egypt. The president’s approach is “hesitant, inconsistent, confused and just plain wrong,” Bolton said.

He added that National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s recent statement that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular” was the “single most foolish statement any American Intelligence official has ever made.” This earned loud applause, chuckles and sporadic whistling. So did this comment: “I don’t think the president cares much about foreign affairs. We need focused attention on these critical national security issues.”

Bolton also criticized defense cuts, the administration’s policies towards China, Czechoslovakia and Iran. He emphasized that American strength is not provocative to its enemies, but rather American weakness is provocative to its enemies. “This administration specializes in this,” Bolton said, adding that “our desire to protect ourselves is not provocative.” He emphasized that this is especially true when it comes to terrorism.

One comment in particular brought the house down before Bolton left the stage. “Obama claims he killed Osama bin Laden when it was ten years in the making. Obama just got out of the way.”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Florida Governor Rick Scott also took the stage on Saturday and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin delivered the keynote address after strolling through the lobby with an entourage. It was a crazy scene in which security had to create a path so Palin could get through the mobs of people that quickly surrounded her. The former vice presidential candidate bailed on CPAC at the last minute in 2011 and was abruptly replaced by Florida Congressman Allen West.

Security was extra tight at this year’s event, with a strong Secret Service and local police presence. Outside the conference headquarters Occupy D.C. activists, community groups and union supporters staged boisterous protests. On Saturday they braved the snow to demonstrate and hold signs. Some admitted they were paid as much as $60 to storm the conference and disrupt certain key presentations.

Joined on stage by his wife and children, the former Pennsylvania senator earned various standing ovations from the pumped-up, capacity crowd at the event’s main ballroom. He presented himself as the true conservative in the race and, like the other two candidates who spoke at CPAC on Friday, trashed Obamacare, saying a mission to overturn it motivated him to run for president.

A few hours later Mitt Romney received his biggest applause about half way into his 25-minute speech, when he got around to trashing Obamacare. Otherwise, the former Massachusetts governor received a much colder reception from the crowd than Santorum or Newt Gingrich, who took the stage last. “I will eliminate Obamacare,” Romney said. It’s the only time the crowd cheered loudly and stood up in approval.

About an hour later Gingrich earned waves of applause with many of his witty one-liners, mostly trashing the Obama Administration. The boisterous crowd often broke out chanting “Newt, Newt, Newt” as he revealed his plans for fixing a broken government. “My first executive order is to abolish all White House czars,” he said over thunderous clapping. Gingrich also said that among his first goals as commander-in-chief is to repeal Obamacare.

Speaking of Obama’s hostile takeover of the nation’s healthcare system, Judicial Watch held an informative panel on the subject in the main ballroom following Romney’s speech. “Obamacare is an unprecedented power grab,” said JW President Tom Fitton before introducing the panel of experts that discussed how the measure is unconstitutional.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who bailed on CPAC at the last minute in 2011, will wrap the conference up with a Saturday afternoon speech. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Florida Governor Rick Scott will also speak at different times throughout the day. Among the more interesting seminars on the final day appears to be one that addresses state versus federal law involving illegal immigration.

“Unlike any leader in modern American history, we are led today by a president that has decided to pit Americans against each other,” Rubio said. “The basic argument he is making to our nation is that the reason why some of us are worse off than we used to be is because other people are doing too well. That the only way for some of us to do better is for some people to do worse.”

The popular Cuban-American lawmaker avoided the hot-button political topic of immigration, though an anonymous flyer circulated around the conference insinuating that Rubio is soft on illegal immigration. It read: “Senator Marco Rubio, elected to the Senate with strong conservative support, gave a keynote speech at the Hispanic Leadership Network Conference in Miami on 1/27/2012, in which he made a number of statements, raising questions about whether he’s distancing himself from his previous opposition to amnesty for illegals.”

Three one-time Republican presidential candidates—Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain—also delivered speeches on the first day. Perry, the governor of Texas, said his presidential campaign just ran out of time. Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, said running for president is “one series of humiliations after another.” Cain, a businessman, said “gutter politics” and putting “family first” led him to drop out of the race. On Friday three presidential candidates—Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—will headline the conference.

Among the more interesting CPAC seminars Thursday was a panel dedicated to the dangerous resurgence of socialism in Latin America. Otto Reich, former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, warned that the type of socialism spreading throughout Latin America is a more pernicious Marxist style than in Europe.

“Latin America is the soft underbelly of the United States,” said Reich, who also served as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela. He noted that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has granted Iran access to the hemisphere while also supporting Marxist guerillas. “I’m concerned about the covert actions and alliance between Iran and Chavez,” Reich said.

Security is heightened at the three-day conference in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, with a strong Secret Service presence and special canine units throughout the premises. Judicial Watch will hold a special panel in the main ballroom Friday afternoon on the unconstitutionality of Obamacare.