Monday, October 1, 2012

Univision report connects Operation Fast and Furious scandal to murders of Mexican teenagers

The Spanish language television news network Univision unleashed a bombshell investigative report on Operation Fast and Furious Sunday evening, finding that in January 2010 drug cartel hit men slaughtered students with weapons the United States government allowed to flow to them across the Mexican border.
“On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez,” according to a version of the Univision report in English, on the ABC News website.
“Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.”
Citing a Mexican Army document it obtained and published, Univision reported that “[t]hree of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).”
That operation was Fast and Furious.
The “massacre,” as Univision described it, was not the only bombshell the network unveiled in its Sunday evening report.
“Univision News identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre,” the Univision report reads.

EUROZONE

We're Getting Close To A Major Freakout About France...



German Manufacturing PMI Climbs To 6-Month High

Economists are looking for improvement.
Read »

600,000 manufacturing jobs go unfilled due to applicants lack of 'soft skills'

It isn't just high tech positions in American manufacturing that aren't being filled. The consultant company Deloitte surveyed the industry and found 600,000 perfectly good jobs going unfilled because of a lack of "soft skills."
What are soft skills?
Wall Street Journal:
At a recent dinner in Washington, D.C., with representatives from major American manufacturing companies, I listened as the talk turned to how hard it is to find qualified applicants for jobs.
"What exactly are the skills you can't find?" I asked, imagining that openings for high-tech positions went begging because, as we hear so often, the training of the U.S. workforce doesn't match up well with current corporate needs.
One of the representatives looked sheepishly around the room and responded: "To be perfectly honest . . . we have a hard time finding people who can pass the drug test." Several other reps gave a knowing nod. Applicants were often so underqualified, they said, that simply finding someone who could properly answer the telephone was sometimes a challenge.
American manufacturing has become more advanced, we're told, and requires computer aptitude, intricate problem solving, and greater dexterity with complex tasks. Surely if Americans were getting STEM education, they would have the skills they need to get jobs in our modern, high-tech economy.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/600000_manufacturing_jobs_go_unfilled_due_to_applicants_lack_of_soft_skills.html#ixzz282OnOhvk

Obama USDA met 30 times with Mexican gov’t to promote food-stamp use among Mexican immigrants

Department of Agriculture personnel in the Obama administration have met with Mexican Government officials dozens of times since the president took office to promote nutrition assistance programs — notably food stamps — among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.
Writing in response to Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ July request for information about the USDA’s little known partnership with the Mexican government to educate citizen and noncitizen immigrants from Mexico about the availability of food stamps and other nutrition assistance programs, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack defended the partnership as a way to curb hunger in America — and the continuation of a program formed under the Bush administration in 2004.
“The Mexico-U.S. Partnership for Nutrition Assistance Initiative is just one of a wide range of USDA partnership activities intended to promote awareness of nutrition assistance among those who need benefits and meet all program requirements under current law.” Vilsack wrote to Sessions in a letter obtained by The Daily Caller.
Since the partnership began, Vilsack wrote, USDA personnel have met at least 151 times with officials from the Mexican government “to discuss nutrition assistance programs as well as to provide program updates.” Those instances included 91 meetings with embassy and consulate staff in 25 U.S. cities; 29 health fairs in 19 U.S. cities; and 31 roundtable discussions, conferences and forums in 20 U.S. cities.
Roughly 30 of these meetings and activities occurred under the Obama administration, Vilsack’s letter revealed.
The agriculture secretary added that the list might not be exhaustive as some of the meetings may not have been recorded.
Sessions has been the lead lawmaker pushing back against the partnership. According to the Alabama senator, the program appears to be in “plain conflict with the sound principles of federal immigration law.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/01/obama-usda-met-30-times-with-mexican-govt-to-promote-food-stamp-use-among-mexican-immigrants/#ixzz282NcA8s3

New York Times Columnist Exposes The Biggest Mistake Of Obama's Presidency

The hot read of the weekend is a piece from New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt titled Obamanomics: A Counterhistory.
The gist: The Obama team came into office thinking a lot about how recoveries in the aftermath of financial crises were liable to be much worse and drawn out than normal recoveries, and yet it didn't attack the problem with the requisite gusto.
Sure, there was the $800 billion stimulus. And the Fed took unprecedented measures to bolster the economy. But it wasn't enough, and there was no thinking ahead that the economy might need even more beyond the initial push. This is despite the fact that some of Obama's advisors clearly had anticipated the possibility that things might be much worse than realized.
Leonhardt notes that in the early days, Obama and his aides were reading the work of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who were about to publish their famous book: "This Time Is Different," which spelled out the gory history of post-crisis recoveries.
In my interviews with Obama advisers during that time, they emphasized that they knew the history and were determined to avoid repeating it. Yet of course they did repeat it. After successfully preventing another depression, in 2009, they have spent much of the last three years underestimating the economy’s weakness. That weakness, in turn, has become Mr. Obama’s biggest vulnerability, helping cost Democrats control of the House in 2010 and endangering his accomplishments elsewhere.

From the Halls of Chicago Schools: Memoirs of a Textbook Salesman

The Chicago teachers strike is over, and Chicago schools are back in session.  The teachers are back to teaching the proverbial "3 Rs," and the students are back trying to learn them.  But is the teaching of the traditional 3 Rs the only thing going on at CPS (Chicago Public Schools)?
For more than 30 years, I was an educational sales representative selling textbooks and workbooks to CPS.  My educational sales experiences included me working with teachers and school administrators -- people who, for the most part, were, and are, overwhelmingly liberal in their thinking.  Unlike most of my customers, I, on the other hand, am a conservative.
My employer, a family-owned schoolbooks publisher in business since the 1930s, is now closing, and I, like so many other Americans living in Obama's economy, have joined the ranks of the unemployed.  Perhaps a silver lining to my unemployed status is that I can now feel free to pen some of my "personally educating moments" while in educational sales.
Consider this the memoirs of a textbook salesman.
Make no mistake: there are many great people at CPS, and over the years, I got to meet many of them.  So if you are hoping for an earth-shattering exposé about systematic CPS corruption, you are going to be disappointed.
Instead, my memoirs are a record of some of my more enlightening personal experiences with CPS and are written from my conservative perspective.  I view them as a compilation of, to steal an educational phrase, teachable moments -- and that is why I am sharing them.

As college student, Eric Holder participated in ‘armed’ takeover of former Columbia University ROTC office

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned.
Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon.
Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”
Black radicals from the same group also occupied the office of Dean of Freshman Henry Coleman until their demands were met. Holder has publicly acknowledged being a part of that action.
The details of the student-led occupation, including the claim that the raiders were “armed,” come from a deleted Web page of the Black Students’ Organization (BSO) at Columbia, a successor group to the SAAS. Contemporary newspaper accounts in The Columbia Daily Spectator, a student newspaper, did not mention weapons.
Holder, now the United States’ highest-ranking law enforcement official, has given conflicting accounts of this episode during college commencement addresses at Columbia, but both the BSO’s website and the Daily Spectator have published facts that conflict with his version of events.
Holder has bragged about his involvement in the “rise of black consciousness” protests at Columbia.