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Thanks to Jeff, here is a mind-blowing story in the Baltimore Sun on Friday about the arrest of a pair of Palestinians who have been running a multi-million dollar cigarette smuggling scam for years.  Because they lived a modest lifestyle and no one knows where all the money went, it’s a good bet it was leaving the country to fund Islamic terrorists around the world (or maybe funding them right here at home!).

NY Police Commissioner Ray Kelly—tough on terrorism in NYC. Photo Fox News

We need to thank the NYPD and Commissioner Ray Kelly who unraveled the scheme from the New York end.  In Maryland our police are way too busy swatting benign conservative Americans like Terry Porter in rural towns.

And, as is the usual case, there is no mention of the brothers’ immigration status—how did they come to be living legally in America in the first place (assuming they were legal immigrants)?*

From the Baltimore Sun:

The Palestinian immigrant and his brother lived next door to each other in homes in West Ocean City, over the years opening a number of businesses throughout the area — three pizza shops, a Mexican restaurant, a liquor store, gas stations, and development companies, court records show.

This week, however, authorities in New York alleged that Basel, 42, and Samir Ramadan, 39, were also at the top of a multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling ring and said they believe members of the organization may have funneled some of their proceeds to terrorist groups. [Update: Photos of the Palestinian alleged terror funders are here---ed]

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the Ramadan brothers had deposited more than $55 million from their untaxed cigarette sales into small banks in and around Ocean City, making a profit of $10 million along the way.

[.....]

Only a fraction of the money has been recovered, and the brothers’ lifestyles were described by authorities as modest. That, along with alleged links among some of the members of the ring to known terrorists such as Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric serving a life sentence for a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks, raised concerns that the money might be funding militant groups.

There is a lot more!  Read it all!

LOL! Someone should check to see if they were political donors to O’Malley and the boys!

Just for your information, I write often about food stamp fraud (trafficking) busts at Refugee Resettlement Watch (archive here).  The majority of the scams are coming from immigrant-run convenience stores.

* We don’t resettle very many Palestinian refugees (a few in recent years) mostly because the militant Islamists in the Middle East want to leave them right there in their supposed “camps” funded largely by US taxpayers so as to remain a thorn in Israel’s side.  I don’t know how Palestinians get into America legally.   I do think the food stamp scammers are using the Investor visas we give out like pez candy.

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Watch and laugh here at Politico!

I thought this day would never come!

On a serious note, everyone is talking about the three big scandals—the IRS, Benghazi, and the AP phone taps.  But, have we already forgotten, only four weeks ago we learned about the intelligence failure that resulted in the bombing of the Boston Marathon.  There are four major Obama Administration scandals!

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This story, hat-tip Cathy, should ring some alarm bells!  Chemical engineering grads out for a little study!  More likely a dry run!

Quabbin Reservoir, Boston’s water supply!

Here is the AP report (Quabbin Reservoir Tests Normal After Trespassing):

BELCHERTOWN, Mass. — Testing done on water samples from the Quabbin Reservoir showed no abnormalities after seven people were seen at a reservoir park entrance shortly after midnight, officials said Wednesday.

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority said water quality samples were analyzed at its lab Tuesday and all came back normal after the alleged trespassing incident.

The central Massachusetts reservoir supplies drinking water to Boston.

State police spokesman David Procopio said a trooper saw two cars parked at a reservoir park entrance at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, then saw five young men and two young women walking toward them from the reservoir. Procopio said Tuesday that the men told police they recently graduated from chemical engineering programs and were curious about the reservoir.

Procopio said they are from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Singapore with addresses in Amherst, Cambridge, Sunderland and Northampton, and New York City. He said law enforcement databases show no warrants, detainers or advisories on them.   [There were no warrants or detainers out for those Boston Chechens either---ed]

Read it all.

Learn more about the Quabbin Reservoir, one of two sources of drinking water for Boston, here.

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…..but we don’t have the financial resources to accept the world’s immigrants!—not to mention the fact that we would be culturally finished as a country.  [Cross-posted from Refugee Resettlement Watch]

Six Members of Congress standing in Speaker Boehner’s way!

That is it in a nutshell!  That is the truth of it all—of the Gang of Eight plus Grover bill now before the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate and the Refugee and Asylum program, the diversity visa lottery, and the list goes on.  When I ask critics of my work here at RRW at what number would they stop before fully closing the borders, they can’t answer.

Six Members of Congress held a press conference on Tuesday maintaining their steadfast opposition to the amnesty plan being labored over in the Senate.  Rumblings on the Hill are that Speaker Boehner wants a bill, and these Members stand in his way of unifying the Republican caucus.

I visited Hill offices yesterday (with a request to strip all refugee and asylum changes from S.744) since I was in DC for the State Department hearing on refugee admissions for FY 2014.

One stop I made was to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office.  I was surprised that the prominent member of the Tea Party caucus, was not on the steps with Rep. Steve King and the others since she was opposed one month ago!  Getting squishy?  Her new staff person on immigration is Javier Sanchez (Javier.Sanchez@mail.house.gov), you might let him know where you stand.

Here is the NumbersUSA report on the press conference:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was joined by five other House Members on Tuesday denouncing the Senate Gang of Eight’s amnesty bill, S.744. Rep. King was joined on the steps of the Capitol by Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama, John Fleming of Louisiana, Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Steve Stockman and Louie Gohmert of Texas. The six Congressmen said they were concerned about the huge negative impact an amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens would have on the national debt, and they said they stood by the rule of law.

The press conference took place as the Senate Judiciary Committee was continuing its markup of the Gang of Eight’s bill.

[....]

“In each of the past five years, 620,000 to 1.05 million foreigners have been given American citizenship,” Rep. Brooks said. “No country on earth comes close to being as generous as America is with its citizenship.

“The immigration issue is not about whether America is compassionate and generous. We are. The immigration issue is about whether America has the financial resources to accept all the world’s immigrants into America. There are hundreds of millions of foreigners who, if they could, would immigrate to America.”

Readers, more soon on my trip to DC and the State Department hearing.  There is much to report.  But, I will leave you now with this—you came through with testimony and completely swamped the refugee contractors with the number of comments you sent in.  Thank you!

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Doug Mainwaring, co-founder National Capital Tea Party Patriots

Our good friend Doug Mainwaring has penned a very thorough piece at American Thinker listing many of the possible cheerleaders who egged-on the IRS in its targeting of conservative and (we have just learned) pro-Israel groups.

American Thinker:

Where in the world did “Low level IRS employees” get the idea that Tea Party, Patriot, Constitution, and Small Government groups should be harassed?

Read on for the stunning answer(s) as Mainwaring piles up the evidence.  Then here is the wrap-up:

Let’s review the possibilities:  President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; Former DNC Head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Senator John McCain, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO); New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg; USA Today’s DeWayne Wickham; MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews; ABC’s Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos;  The New York Times’ Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd,* Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman; The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, Dana Millbank, and Eugene Robinson; and the Editors of the Wall Street Journal.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg, the fountainhead of the fabricated cascade of false information meant to destroy the Tea Party movement, Patriot, Constitution and Small Government groups.

The IRS’s mistreatment of these groups is evidence of our Political Aristocracy becoming unglued, unhinged and unstable.  It is evidence of the fragility of their grip on both Washington and the Nation.  

I don’t know about you, but are you getting a sense that something is coming unglued—exactly how and why is not yet clear.

* Just a little point of interest, Maureen Dowd is my husband’s first cousin and when the Tea Party movement got underway and she was writing critically about us, I wrote to her to invite her to meet some real Tea Party people.  She never answered my e-mail.

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Obama is stumbling on several fronts these days and one more in the growing list is his inability to get his pick for Labor Secretary, Thomas Perez, confirmed.  This time it’s  not just trouble being caused by the evil GOP, but by fellow Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings.

Obama: My man Tom! AP Photo

We have an extensive archive on Thomas Perez, supported for his present position in the US Justice Department by none other than prominent Maryland Republicans Del. Tony O’Donnell and former MDGOP chairman John Kane (see our extensive archive here).  No word as to whether those two have weighed in favorably on Perez’s potential promotion to US Labor Secretary.

Even if I’m not writing here as often lately (immigration fraud keeping me busy elsewhere), I do want to keep certain long-time topics updated, and in the case of Perez (former board member of CASA de Maryland), do not be surprised if he is back on the Maryland political scene sooner or later running for US Senator or Governor, in which case we will have a handy list of his misdeeds as the second in command to Attorney General Eric Holder cataloged here at PTPR.

Here is the story from the Examiner:

Rep. Elijah Cummings,  D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, joined Chairman Darrell Issa in demanding that the White House’s nominee to be labor secretary, Thomas Perez, turn over some 1,200 private emails.

The change is notable because Cummings has been an ardent defender of the nominee. He said a House hearing just Tuesday that Republicans had made “partisan and unsubstantiated claims against Mr. Perez.”

Republicans believe Perez, currently the Justice Department’s top civil rights enforcer, used a private email account to conduct official business in an attempt to  circumvent federal transparency laws. Perez has refused to comply with an earlier subpoena to turn over the emails. To date congressional investigators have been allowed to view only 34 of the 1,200.

On Wednesday, Cummings told Perez he has to turn the emails over and they must be in “unredacted form” as well. Here’s the text of the letter signed by Issa and Cummings:

We write to request that you produce all documents responsive to the subpoena issued to you by the committee on April 10, 2013, regarding your use of a non-official email account to conduct official Department of Justice business. The Department has represented to the committee that roughly 1,200 responsive emails exist. To allow the committee to fully examine these emails, please produce all responsive documents in unredacted form to the committee no later than Friday, May 10, 2013.

This was the second blow Perez’s nomination suffered this week. He was originally scheduled to appear before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Wednesday for a confirmation vote, but it was abruptly postponed until next week.

I wonder how many more in the O-man’s administration keep special e-mail accounts so that the public can’t see what they are up to—the same issue helped bring down Obama’s EPA Administrator a few months ago.

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Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit thinks so.  His post is called Obama Administration Used Alinsky Tactics & IRS To Ensure Tea Party Was Not a Factor in 2012.

After the monumental Republican victories in 2010, the Democrats knew they had to do something to stop the momentum.  Fortunately for them, their Alinskyite leader had trained them well.  Remember Alinsky’s rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”  Hoft writes:

Democrats and the corrupt media isolated the Tea Party. They said Tea Party members were racists, radicals and Nazis.

It was an all-out assault.

And just to be sure they were not a problem, the Obama Administration and IRS tied Tea Party groups up in paperwork and audits. Today the Internal Revenue Service admitted that they targeted conservative groups for additional reviews during the 2012 elections – At least 75 groups were targeted. Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status.

It was a brilliant strategy. The Tea Party was not a factor and Obama won a second term thanks to Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

Sounds right to me.

Update from Ann:  Be sure to see the Hot Air post by Mary Katherine Ham on the things the IRS asked Tea Party groups, here.

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That’s the gist of this very provocative article entitled, ‘Three New Facts about the Tea Party’ at the The American Prospect.   Hat tip: Paul

Author Abby Rapoport begins with this lead-in:

Tens of thousands of Tea Partiers descended on Washington in 2009. They have not gone away! Or given up!

The first large-scale political-science survey of Tea Party activists shows the movement isn’t going anywhere—and the GOP had better brace itself.

For a movement that’s helped to reshape the Republican Party—and by extension, reshape American politics—we know shockingly little about the people who make up the Tea Party. While some in the GOP once hoped to co-opt the movement, it’s increasingly unclear which group—the Tea Party or establishment Republicans—is running the show. Politicians have largely relied on conjecture and assumption to determine the positions and priorities of Tea Party activists.

Until now. The results of the first political science survey of Tea Party activists show that the constituency isn’t going away any time soon—and Republicans hoping the activists will begin to moderate their stances should prepare for disappointment.

And here are three things snipped from the piece that our reader and informant, Paul, found most informative.  (I appreciate Paul doing this for me, so I can be lazy this morning!)

“…the Tea Party activists doing work for the Republicans are surprisingly negative about the party they’re helping.”

[.....]

“…the Tea Party cares more about what nominees believe than whether they can win—and compromising on politics means compromising on principle.”

[.....]

“On some issues… the establishment Republicans are actually closer to Democrats than they are to the Tea Party respondents. That’s a gap too large to be overcome by a few political action committees and gestures of goodwill.”

As the Tea Party movement matures, I hope it doesn’t find itself becoming just like the GOP with insider shenanigans by a handful of “ruling class” wannabes—alas I’m hearing rumblings of that happening in Virginia.

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The magazine cover is entitled “Rubio’s Folly.”  The cynic that I’ve become says conservative National Review/NRO is protecting their ol’ buddy Norquist but everyone knows that the Open Borders pusher and Islamist is a key driving force behind “comprehensive” immigration reform and a Rubio confidante.

Here Grover has Rubio’s back (from Talking Points Memo):

Grover’s unsmiling puss can be seen between laughing Rubio and mildly amused McCain. The joke is on you, the American taxpayer and worker!

And here is the cover shot for National Review:

Presto! No Grover!

For our complete archive on Grover Norquist (he is NOT a Tea Partier and neither is Rubio) go here.  Grover has firmly aligned himself with the likes of La Raza (the race!).  Marco Rubio should back out of his folly NOW if he has aspirations for higher office.

Follow me on twitter!   AnnC@RefugeeWatcher

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Bomber Mom, Zubeidat, poster girl for LEGAL immigrants on welfare?

There is so much happening and I’m getting hundreds of new readers at Refugee Resettlement Watch, that I just don’t have any extra time to write here at PTPR (for now).

Visit my latest post, Tsarnaevs milked taxpayers for over $100,000 in benefits (asylees are welcome to welfare!)

And, this is our top post at RRW this past week:  Laura Ingraham calls for a halt to all Muslim immigration.

Thanks Ted Kennedy!

Then follow me on twitter.  I’m Ann C @RefugeeWatcher

Sincere thanks to Jim J. for prodding me to join the twitter age!