Mediaboss Marketing

Top U.S. counterterrorism officials say they worry a potential terrorist could be hiding among refugees who are looking to come to the United States after escaping the brutal war in Syria.

"It's clearly a population of concern, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, went further, saying it would be a huge mistake to bring refugees from the conflict to the U.S. even as an estimated 4 million children, women and men have been forced to flee Syria and another 7 million have been displaced from their homes there, unable to leave.

Senior officials leading the State Departments refugee efforts say the U.S. government has a long history of caring for the innocent victims of war.

Its not a matter of should we do it, its really a matter of how we do it, Larry Bartlett, the State Departments director of Refugee Admission for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, told ABC News. One of the fundamental principles of our country is that we care about others. We will help others.

Bartlett insisted every refugee is vetted through an intensive system, drawing on information and expertise from several U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Defense Department.

We have a very slow process of moving refugees through our pipeline, and part of it is because of the security vetting component, Bartlett said.

Homeland security officials also testified Wednesday that any potential refugees from Syria would receive the most rigorous screening.

"Any tasking we're given ... will be as thorough as we can make it," said Francis Taylor, the head of the Department of Homeland Securitys intelligence office.

Yet thats not reassurance enough for McCaul and other leading Republicans, who recently penned a letter to National Security Advisor Susan Rice cautioning that the U.S. governments ability to screen refugees from Syria might not be sufficient.

The continued civil war and destabilization in Syria undeniably make it more difficult to acquire the information needed to conduct reliable threat assessments on specific refugees, they wrote in the letter two weeks ago.

With tens of thousands of Syrians joining groups in the region like the Islamic State, the U.S. government cannot allow the refugee process to become a backdoor for jihadists, they added.

At the hearing Wednesday, an FBI official also questioned whether the U.S. intelligence community with few assets on the ground in Syria and little insight into the country from elsewhere can provide authorities with the information they need to properly determine whether any refugee could pose a threat.

"You have to have information to vet, said FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach, who heads the bureaus counterterrorism division. Databases don't [have] the information on those individuals, and that's the concern.

Still, Rasmussen vowed the full weight of the U.S. intelligence community would be employed to "unearth" any concerning information about potential refugees. And Bartlett and other State Department officials say the U.S. is far from opening the flood gates.

Of the 7 million of Syrians seeking refuge, only about 500 have been let in the United States. Compare that with Syrias neighbor, Jordan, whose Foreign Minister recently said theyve let in over 80,000 Syrians -- a figure that represents nearly 21 percent of Jordans total population. Or compare it to the response to the Iraq war, with the U.S. admitting over 120,000 Iraqis.

So far Germany and Sweden are leading the charge when it comes to accepting Syrians. Germany has let in nearly 12,000 refugees, not including those who have sought asylum there.

Officials at the State Department were quick to report that overall the U.S. accepts more refugees than the rest of the world combined. Bartlett and others also say they expect the U.S. to steadily increase the number of Syrians it accepts as applications at the United Nations continue to pile up.

Original post:
Officials Fear Syrian Refugees Could Pose Threat to US ...

On their first day in office, newly elected members of the U.S. House of Representatives take an oath on the House floor -- to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States."

But before his election as Speaker of the House, Rep. Paul Ryan took another oath -- this time to the so-called "Freedom Caucus," a group of several dozen overwhelmingly white, conservative Congressmen from overwhelmingly white, conservative congressional districts.

Specifically, reports the National Review, the oath "extracts Ryan's word that he will not bring up comprehensive immigration reform 'so long as Barack Obama is president' and, as speaker, even in the future, Ryan will not allow any immigration bill to reach the floor for a vote unless a 'majority' of GOP members support it."

In short, in order to become the new speaker of the House, Ryan has vowed to block immigration reform from coming to a vote until January 2017 -- at the earliest.

This is the second time Ryan has made a pledge on immigration reform. I remember the first: in 2014, Ryan called me at the Sojourners office, offering to help Christians pass comprehensive immigration reform. That led to meetings in Ryan's office with key evangelical leaders about how to do that strategically, with Ryan telling us that the "evangelical factor" on immigration reform was something he had never seen before.

He promised us on several occasions that he would help bring immigration reform bills to the floor of the House. Many other Republicans promised the same thing to evangelical pastors who came to visit them from their districts.

I especially remember a day in July of that year, when three Catholic bishops representing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, two fellow evangelical leaders, and I met with Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. A bipartisan immigration reform bill had already passed in the Senate, and the Republican leaders promised us they would bring the issue to a vote in the House. We met with Ryan again, and he pledged to help.

But the Republican leadership failed to do that. They failed to keep their promise to Christian leaders, instead morally caving in to pressure from the strong anti-immigrant white rightwing base of their party.

In our private conversations with many Republicans -- on the Hill and in their districts -- they would freely admit the problems of racial fear and anger from that constituency. But the official party deference to racialized rightwing groups and districts closed the window on immigration reform in Congress.

President Obama -- courageously, many of us believed -- followed up with executive orders designed to at least relieve the threat of deportation from many immigrant families. While doing so he readily agreed that genuine reform would eventually take an act of Congress. But Republicans vilified the President for those orders, and they are still being stalled in courts.

Speaker Ryan reiterated this position on Nov. 1, saying on CBS' Face the Nation, "I think it would be a ridiculous notion to try and work on an issue like [immigration] with a president we simply cannot trust on this issue."

Asked whether he would work with future presidents on the issue, Ryan said his job now is to build and respect consensus among his Republican caucus -- implying prospects for comprehensively fixing our broken immigration system will likely face a continued Republican block.

How ironic that Ryan talks about "trust," because only two years ago the same leader said, "We do not want to have a society where we have different classes of people who cannot reach their American dream by not being a full citizen."

Deep down, I believe Ryan knows immigration reform is good for families, our communities, and our economy. I believe that because he has told me and other Christian leaders that he believes that.

Now, he's thrown that all away to become the new House speaker.

This resistance isn't limited to Speaker Ryan. On Nov. 2, Rep. Steve King, a longtime opponent of immigration reform, circulated a bill to make protesting at the Capitol a deportable offense. According to The Huffington Post, the bill "would authorize U.S. Capitol Police to help enforce immigration laws...[with] the specific aim of targeting protesters...calling for amnesty."

Just last week, I was in the Shenandoah Mountains with a few fellow Sojourners. We were telling stories around the campfire, recalling the "Pledge of Resistance" we helped organize in the 1980s in response to the threat of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua.

That pledge said:

"We will resist with our minds, hearts, and bodies any intervention by the United States, directly or indirectly, in Nicaragua. We will call upon our churches, organizations, networks, communities, and friends to join us in such resistance, and we will begin to prepare others for it. Our faith compels us to respond: we are committed to an active nonviolence that confronts the forces of war and the structures of injustice. If such an intervention takes place we will respond. ...We pledge ourselves to work for peace and justice in Central America. ...May peace come to our minds, our hearts, our world."

Eighty thousand people signed that pledge promising to enter the offices of their members of Congress and refusing to leave until they were arrested if the United States invaded Nicaragua.

We later learned from inside intelligence that this pledge, and its credible capacity for action, helped prevent a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua.

Those words inspired us then, and they can inspire us now.

The time may be upon us to say that if the Capitol Police are ordered to arrest peaceful immigrant demonstrators, they will have to arrest thousands of the other Christians as well.

Let us make ourselves clear (and I trust that I speak for many other Christians in this regard): Immigration reform will be a voting issue for Christians across the theological spectrum, including evangelicals and pentecostals, Catholics and Protestants, in 2016. We will vote for and against candidates for office on every level -- local, national, and the presidency itself -- on whether they favor or oppose comprehensive immigration reform. The particular bills to accomplish that can vary, but Jesus's instruction to welcome the stranger provides the moral principles that unite us in an urgent call to fix a broken and cruel immigration system.

And depending on the results of those elections, the time may be upon us to renew our pledges of resistance.

So here is a message for Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Steve King or any other politician who proposes to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants -- thereby tearing them out of our nation, our lives, and our churches, and ripping their families apart: If a new president calls for massive deportation, some of us Christian leaders will call for massive civil disobedience. And thousands of Christians -- Latino, Anglo, Asian, and African Americans -- will join the protest to block those deportations.

We will do all that we can to disrupt the "management" of a political deportation plan counter to the gospel of Jesus Christ that calls us to "welcome the stranger" and reminds us that how we treat the stranger is how we treat Christ himself.

That is not a threat. It is a promise of what we will and can do.

Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners. His book, The (Un)Common Good: How the Gospel Brings Hope to a World Divided, the updated and revised paperback version of On God's Side, is available now.

The rest is here:
Dear Speaker Ryan: We're Keeping Our Promise on ...

The Democratic Party of Arkansas is the affiliate of the Democratic Party in the state of Arkansas. It is responsible for promoting the ideologies and core values of the national Democratic Party in Arkansas.

Before Arkansas became a state on June 15, 1836, its politics was dominated by a small group commonly called "The Family" or "The Dynasty" until the American Civil War.[1] The founder of this party was James Conway, who was inspired by the death of his older brother, Henry Conway.[2] Henry Conway was killed in a duel, that took place on October 27, 1827, by Robert Crittenden, former friend, that soon became his political opposition.[3] In an act to avenge his brother's death, he formed the first political party of Arkansas, "The Dynasty".[3] Many of the members in this group were related by either blood or marriage, and thus how it received the name, "The Family".[2] This group was closely allied with former President Andrew Jackson.[1]

Arkansas began its statehood with a strong Democratic dominance in politics. The Democratic Party won every election for governor until 1966, when Republican Winthrop Rockefeller won Governorship.[1] Although the Democratic Party of Arkansas is not as dominant as it once was, it still has a strong presence in the state. However, that began to change in the early 2010s.

With the election of Barack Obama as President and the leftward shift of the national Democratic Party, Arkansas Democrats have seen their influence gradually decline. While Arkansas was able to resist the rise of the Republican Party throughout the rest of the South (partially thanks to Bill Clinton), it could not hold off forever. The Republicans began to make serious inroads in 2010, and it continued until it finally in 2014, when Republicans captured all the statewide offices, both chambers of the state legislature, all the U.S House seats and both U.S Senate seats, putting the Democrats in the minority for the first time in state history.

Democrat Governors won the Gubernatorial elections in the State of Arkansas since 1941:

[4][5]

The Democratic Party of Arkansas has a platform standing on the following principles: law and order with justice, every citizen, regardless of religion or race, is entitled to an equal voice in government. Also, it advocates equal opportunity, fairness and justice, and progressiveness. It not only promotes these standards, but also takes action to achieve them. With these principles comes a list of 52 rules.[6] The platform is filled with values such as ethics, education, economic development and opportunity, agriculture, transportation and infrastructure, environment and energy, health care, social security/medicaid/medicare, taxes, military/veterans and nation's security, criminal justice, civil rights and civil liberties, and public service. Its position on these topics mirrors closely that of the national Democratic Party.[7]

In 1978, then attorney general, Bill Clinton and wife Hillary Rodham Clinton were accused of being a part of a scandal with former friends and business partners, James McDougal and his wife, Susan McDougal.[8] The couples planned on buying land in Marion County, Arkansas to build vacation homes for tourists, and those that just wanted to get away.[8] However, the investment went bad, and both couples lost a numerous amount of money due to its failure. While Clinton was governor of Arkansas, questions about whether or not they properly paid taxes on the property, whether he extended favors to the loan and savings in exchange for campaign funds and whether McDougal may have illegally channeled funds from the savings and loans to the project arose.[8] After charges were dropped against the Clintons, David Hale claimed that Clinton pressured him into giving them a $300,000 loan to finance the project.[8]

See the original post here:
Democratic Party of Arkansas - Wikipedia, the free ...

Based on the latest research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonprofit organization that looks into the state and federal policies and its effects on low-income families and communities, states have taken it upon themselves to act on immigration rather than wait on Congress to act on a federal level.

Erica Williams, assistant director of state and fiscal research at CBPP, said their latest paper, titled "For States, Inclusive Approach to Unauthorized Immigrants Can Help Build Better Economies," illustrates how state tax and budget policies, among others, are affecting different communities but particularly those in a lower income bracket. Williams said state-based immigration legislation, as a result of the lack of federal comprehensive immigration reform, has been more positive in recent years as many states are looking at how to address undocumented immigrants and bring them into the "mainstream economy," which benefits both immigrant and state economies.

"The most important takeaway is that by taking a sort of commonsense, inclusive approach to unauthorized immigrants, states really can better their economies by producing a more educated workforce, ensuring that more employers are paying their workers fairly -- regardless of their immigration status -- and help to generate additional revenues to pay for the schools and other public services that build a strong foundation for a state economy for broadly shared prosperity," Williams told Latin Post.

"All of that is good for everyone."

In regards to why several U.S. states have been apprehensive to develop or adopt pro-immigrant legislation, Williams said the topic is still a "political issue," and there people with some fears that granting immigrants with certain benefits would somehow reduce incomes or employment for native-born workers. She said the "real truth," however, is that native-born workers will benefit from states bringing in undocumented immigrants into the mainstream economy.

"These are folks that are already living here in the United States. They live and work in communities across the country... if they are doing better, we all do better," Williams said.

"It's particularly true in the case, for example, of labor law enforcement and making sure people are paid the wages that they earned and that they're making at least the legal minimum wage."

Williams noted enforcing labor law enforcement would also benefit native-born workers in ensuring they, too, receive appropriate wages.

According to the CBPP, President Barack Obama's immigration executive actions, although temporary, can attract approximately $845 million in new state and local tax revenues. The CBPP stated the revenue increase is caused through immigrants paying more income taxes and earning higher wages.

Obama's immigration executive actions are the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) programs, which would grant eligible undocumented immigrants to receive permits based on specific standards by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and temporarily stay in the U.S. While DACA has been in effect based on Obama's 2012 guidelines, he expanded the program in November 2014 along with the introduction of DAPA. The extended DACA program and DAPA, however, has yet to be in effect due to legal actions

If comprehensive immigration reform was to be implemented by Congress and provide permanent legal work status to nearly all undocumented workers, the U.S. would see more economic revenues than DACA and DAPA. With comprehensive immigration reform, $2.2 billion in state and local tax revenues would occur.

Back on a state level, states would also reportedly benefit from allowing immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities and obtain financial aid. CBPP said expanding higher education access would boost immigrants' skills and wages within the states' workforce.

Further, granting undocumented immigrants with access to a driver's license would allow them to legally drive to work or shop, as well as providing states with revenue gains from licensing fees. As of November, Washington D.C. and 12 states have passed laws to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver's license, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont and Washington State.

"States are realizing that they can't just wait around for something to happen at the federal level, that there are people in their communities that are being left out of the mainstream and who could be contributing a lot more if they were just allowed to," Williams said.

__

For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Politics Editor Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeOor contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.

Tagsimmigration, Immigration Reform, Erica Williams

2015 Latin Post. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Originally posted here:
US States Adopting 'Inclusive' Immigration Reform Seeing ...

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Sunday he will not consider or negotiate an immigration reform bill during President Obama's tenure, ruling out calls to revive the issue in an effort to broaden GOP appeal to Latino voters before the 2016 election.

Ryan, who was elected speaker last week, said he had promised the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which opposes easing immigration laws, that he would not move forward on the issue before a new president takes office.

Ryan, who appeared on five major TV talk shows, blamed Obama, not the caucus, however.

"I don't think we can trust the president on this issue," Ryan said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "The president has proven himself untrustworthy on this issue because he tried to unilaterally rewrite the law himself. Presidents don't write laws. Congress does."

In 2013, the Senate passed an ambitious immigration reform package that hadbipartisan support and was backed by the White House. But the bill died when the GOP-controlled House refused to take it up.

SIGN UP for the free Essential Politics newsletter >>

After the bill died, the president took two executive actions to suspend deportation of some immigrants who have lived in the United States for several years and had clean records. Those who came forward could have obtained work permits.

The president stressed that his actions were limited and were authorized under the law.

But a federal judge in Texas blocked the larger order from taking effect, and since July, the administration has been awaiting a decision from a federal appeals court in New Orleans.

Ryan, who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012, said he would press a "very specific and bold agenda" to break the legislative deadlock in Congress.

"We have been too timid for too long around here. We have been bold on tactics, but not on policy, not on an agenda," he said on ABC's "This Week."

"That is the kind of leadership I think people are hungry for here," he added.

Ryan said he did not watch Wednesday's Republican presidential debate, but that he would easily support any of the 14 candidates against the Democratic front-runner.

"Every one of these people would be a far better president than Hillary Clinton," he said.

Twitter: @DavidGSavage

ALSO

Senate OKs budget and debt deal, sends measure to Obama

After runaway blimp debacle, fresh scrutiny of JLENS missile defense program

Man walking down the street in Colorado Springs shoots three people to death

Here is the original post:
Ryan rules out quick immigration reform: 'I don't think we ...