Tag: mexico

DEA now linked to Operation Fast & Furious.

On the record, like.

It would appear that the DEA does not want to be the fall guy in Operation Fast & Furious*, either:  DEA head Michele M. Leonhart admitted in a letter to Senator Grassley (Judiciary) and Rep. Issa (Oversight) that her organization was in fact involved in the investigation, and provided support for it.  This is a significant admission by Ms. Leonhart, given that (as Bob Owens** of Pajamas Media reminds us) there is an existing allegation by the former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives (BATFE) Phoenix office that the DEA was a full partner in the proceedings. Continue reading DEA now linked to Operation Fast & Furious.

The Great Fast & Furious… Fast & Furious Data-Dump.

The fact that the sordid details about Operation Fast & Furious (short edition: the federal government allowed guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorists, who then proceeded to murder people with them) are all breaking during the debt ceiling situation is either the absolute best or the absolute worst luck for the Obama administration.  On the one hand, the administration is not getting hammered with new details and demands for information every day: on the other, eventually the debt ceiling situation will be over, and when all that happens, the details will have piled up most alarmingly.

Don’t believe me?  Let me just list the stuff that we’ve learned this week.:

Continue reading The Great Fast & Furious… Fast & Furious Data-Dump.

Fast & Furious update: BATFE emails show stonewalling.

(Via The Sundries Shack) Let me summarize this LA Times article: Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 by Mexican narco-terrorists. Agents of the BAFTE* investigating the shooting almost immediately discovered that some of the guns seized at the scene of the murder were guns that were supposedly being tracked by a joint BATFE/Department of Justice program called Fast & Furious; this program was deliberately allowing and encouraging guns to be sold to people who would illegally resell them to criminal enterprises. However, this extraordinarily awkward detail was not in fact mentioned to Senator Grassley, who (with Rep. Darrell Issa) is investigating Fast & Furious** – and apparently deliberately. Instead, BATFE claimed that no F&F guns were used in the shooting.

Let me highlight this point. BATFE knew that there F&F guns were sold to the people who murdered Agent Terry, because they found those guns there on the scene. But the bullets that killed Agent Terry did not come from those guns, thus giving what BATFE thought was a possible out: after all, they weren’t actually used, right? Just bought, brought along, brandished, and available: which is also a perfectly-viable definition of ‘used,’ but one that BATFE decided not to highlight, for obvious reasons. This novel use of the word ‘used’ was and is a patently nitwit notion, of course: the government’s culpability in Terry’s death was already set in stone when the first gun went off. But it was about the only notion that BATFE and DoJ has to work with. The American electorate gets really intense when a government screw-up gets its own people killed, you see. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: BATFE emails show stonewalling.

#rsrh Free advice to Assistant AG Ronald Weich.

Back-talking the Chair of the House Oversight Committee and the Ranking Member (for now) of the Senate Judiciary Committee is not a viable long-term survival strategy.  Particularly when you’re intimately involved in a burgeoning government scandal involving permitting and encouraging guns to be illegally resold to Mexican narco-terrorist organizations.  Doubly so when the people that you’re back-talking have top-level government officials who are already pointing fingers and naming names.

Triply so when you yourself, Ronald Weich, can in fact be best described as part of the firewall between your boss (Attorney General Eric Holder) and one heck of a political scandal.  Or possibly ‘cannon fodder.’

Moe Lane

#rsrh Illegal immigration down?

I quibble at ‘surprising,’ mind you:

The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.

And perhaps ’cause’ instead of ’causes:’ the article makes it clear that there are a bunch of unrelated circumstances involved, ranging from lower family size to increasing Mexican GDP to skyrocketing narco-terrorist-related activity on the border to generally improved services to a rather hostile environment to small businesses in the USA to a somewhat easier path to getting legal work visas.  The short version?  The suggestion is that the illegal alien population in America is pretty much stagnant right now*.  And, since it’s the New York Times that we’re talking about, the subtitle writes itself:

Democrats, professional activists hardest hit**.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Illegal immigration down?

So when the first reports of space zombies come out of Mexico…

…blame the Russians:

A LOUD explosion and ball of fire that people in central Mexico reported seeing in the sky was actually a Russian satellite plunging back to earth, experts said.

“We think it was the space wreckage of a Russian satellite that was catalogued by the Department of Defense of the United States and which we knew could pass over Mexican territory,” engineer Fernando de la Peno said.

Mr De la Peno is also a chief proponent of establishing a Mexican space agency[*].

Anyway. Russian military ‘recon’ satellite, disappearing crater, fragmented re-entry… yeah. Zombies. What’s Spanish for ‘space zombies,’ anyway? The colloquial one, at least? ‘Llllllooooooosssssssss cerebrrrrrooooooosssssss’ I more or less already worked out on my own.

Moe Lane

*Hey, remember the days when the American response to the last sentence quoted there would be an indulgent, patronizing chuckle, and not a rueful “I remember having one of those”?

PS: There are not just Mexican zombie flicks.

There are Mexican masked wrestling zombie flicks. Because God loves you, and wishes for you to be happy.

Good news/bad news on the [insert name here] Flu.

Good news: this strain of the flu apparently isn’t as bad as people were thinking.

Bad news: we’re probably going to have some hysteria over this anyway, given the recent White House advisory (and the fact that masks are the top three sellers on Amazon) (both via Drudge).

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE] Heh.  See here for more good news/bad news.

Swine Flu Biden.

[UPDATE x2] And welcome, AoSHQ readers.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. Oh, why not? – vampirism post here, for no particular reason except that it beat watching the press conference.

Brother Pejman expands on this report that Vice President Biden is telling people to avoid public transportation and yank their kids out of schools.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If President Obama wishes to handle this crisis by sending Vice President Biden to an undisclosed location until it’s over, well, sacrifices must be made.

Moe Lane

PS: Watch the video that Pej found above: it’s not every day where you see what is effectively a pet media organ of the Democratic party call for closing the border. And watch for the gaffe at about 5:15. Freudian slip there, Joe?

Crossposted to RedState.

By the way, we’re having a trade war with Mexico.

Yes, yes, I know: NAFTA’s supposed to prevent that sort of thing, but we’re having one anyway:

Ricardo Alday, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington said pressuring politicians by hitting imports from states with key Democratic leaders with tariffs of up to 90 percent “is one the main considerations,” for the action, the Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday.

The official list of products has not been released, but a draft obtained by economist Dermot Hayes at the University of Iowa suggest the tariffs will pinpoint almonds from California, sunglasses from Illinois, bowling equipment from Nevada and books from New York — the home states of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, President Barack Obama, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And before you ask: yes, it’s because of the bill that Dina Titus (D-NV) said that she read. Continue reading By the way, we’re having a trade war with Mexico.