The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part III of III)

The blurring of America’s Southwestern frontier is becoming a geographical fact that all the security devices on the border cannot invalidate.

Nevertheless, while I admire Huntington’s ability to isolate and expose a fundamental dilemma that others in academia and the media are too polite to address, I do not completely agree with his conclusions. Huntington believes in a firm reliance on American nationalism in order to preserve its Anglo-Protestant culture and values in the face of the partial Latinoization of our society. I believe that while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set contours on what is achievable and what isn’t. And the organic connection between Mexico and America is simply too overwhelming. Huntington correctly derides cosmopolitanism (and imperialism too) as elite visions. But a certain measure of cosmopolitanism, Huntington to the contrary, is inevitable and not to be disparaged.

America, I believe, will emerge in the course of the 21st century as a civilization oriented from north to south, from Canada to Mexico, rather than as an east-to-west, racially lighter-skinned island in the temperate zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This multiracial assemblage will be one of sprawling suburban city-states, each nurturing its own economic relationships throughout the world, as technology continues to collapse distances. America, in my vision, would become the globe’s preeminent duty-free hot zone for business transactions, a favorite place of residence for the global elite. In the tradition of Rome, it will continue to use its immigration laws to asset-strip the world of its best and brightest and to further diversify an immigrant population that, as Huntington fears, is defined too much by Mexicans. Nationalism will be, perforce, diluted a bit, but not so much as to deprive America of its unique identity or to undermine its military.

But this vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If outgoing President Felipe Calderón and his successors can break the back of the drug cartels (a very difficult prospect, to say the least), then the United States will have achieved a strategic victory greater than any possible in the Middle East. A stable and prosperous Mexico, working in organic concert with the United States, would be an unbeatable combination in geopolitics.

A post-cartel Mexico combined with a stabilized and pro-U.S. Colombia (now almost a fact) would fuse together the Western Hemisphere’s largest, third-largest, and fourth-largest countries in terms of population, easing America’s continued sway over Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. In a word, Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich is correct when he suggests that fixing Mexico is more important than fixing Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as Bacevich claims, Mexico is a possible disaster, and our concentration on the Greater Middle East has diverted us from it. If the present course continues, it will lead to more immigration, legal and especially illegal, creating the scenario that Huntington fears. Calderón’s offensive against the drug lords has claimed 50,000 lives since 2006, with close to 4,000 victims in the first half of 2010 alone. Moreover, the cartels have graduated to military-style assaults, with complex traps set and escape routes closed off. “These are war fighting tactics they’re using,” concludes Javier Cruz Angulo, a Mexican security expert. “It’s gone way beyond the normal strategies of organized crime.” Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, writes: “If that trend persists, it is an extremely worrisome development for the health, perhaps even the viability, of the Mexican state.”

The weaponry used by the cartels is generally superior to that of the Mexican police and comparable to that of the Mexican military. Coupled with military-style tactics, the cartels can move, in Carpenter’s words, “from being mere criminal organizations to being a serious insurgency.” United Nations peacekeepers have deployed in places with less violence than Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. Already police officers and local politicians are resigning their posts for fear of assassination, and Mexican business and political elites are sending their families out of the country, even as there is sustained middle- and upper-middle-class flight to the United States.

Mexico is now at a crossroads: it is either in the early phase of finally taking on the cartels, or it is sinking into further disorder—or both. As of this writing, violence is dropping significantly, but that’s mainly because the cartels are consolidating their control. What the United States does could be pivotal. And yet the U.S. security establishment has been engaged in other notoriously corrupt and unstable societies half a world away—Iraq until 2011 and Afghanistan at least until 2014. Unlike those places, the record of U.S. military involvement in the Mexican border area is one of reasonable success. As Danelo points out, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States and Mexico reduced banditry on the border through binational cooperation. From 1881 to 1910, Mexican President Porfirio Díaz joined with American presidents to jointly patrol the border.

Mexican rurales rode with Texas Rangers in pursuing the Comanche. In Arizona, Mexican and American soldiers mounted joint campaigns against Apaches.

Today, the job of thwarting drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain is a job for the military, quietly assisting Mexican authorities and subordinate to them. But the legal framework for such cooperation barely exists. While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Adapted from The Revenge of Geography, by Robert D. Kaplan, published by Random House, Inc., and on sale from Sept. 11, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Robert D. Kaplan. By arrangement with Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part II of III)

Northern Mexico contains its own geographical divisions. The lowlands and desert of Sonora in the west are generally stable; the Rio Grande basin in the east is the most developed and interconnected with the United States—culturally, economically, and hydrologically—and has benefited the most from NAFTA. In the center are mountains and steppes, which are virtually lawless: witness the border city of Ciudad Juárez, the murder capital of Mexico, where 700 people were killed in the early months of 2010 alone.

In 2009 more than 2,600 died violently in the city of 1.2 million; some 200,000 more may have fled. In Chihuahua, the state where Ciudad Juárez is located, the homicide rate was 143 per 100,000—one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere. The northern mountains and steppe have always been the bastion of Mexico’s tribes: the drug cartels, Mennonites, Yaqui Indians, and so forth. This harsh frontier was difficult for the Spanish to tame. Later on, in the 1880s, it was a lair for Geronimo and his Apaches.

Think of other remote highlands that provided refuge for insurgents: the Chinese communists in Shaanxi, the Cuban revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra, and al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan. The drug cartels come out of this geographical tradition.

Most of the drug-related homicides have occurred in only six of Mexico’s 32 states, mostly in the north. That’s another indicator of how northern Mexico is separating out from the rest of the country (though the violence in Veracruz and the regions of Michoacán and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels completely falters, and Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense lose control of the north, with grave implications for the United States.

If that happens, writes Robert C. Bonner, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “the United States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South America.”

The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who made a career out of clairvoyance, devoted his last book to the challenge that Mexico posed to the United States. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Huntington posited that Latino history was demographically moving north into the U.S. and would consequently change the American character. Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants: America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. For only by adopting Anglo-Protestant culture do immigrants become American. Dissent, individualism, republicanism ultimately all devolve from Protestantism.

“While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ.” But this creed, Huntington reasons, might be subtly undone by an advancing Hispanic, Catholic, pre-Enlightenment society. “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s, ” Huntington writes. “It is also blurring the border between Mexico and America, introducing a very different culture.”

Boston College professor Peter Skerry writes that one of Huntington’s “more startlingly original and controversial insights” is that while Americans champion diversity, “today’s immigrant wave is actually the least diverse in our history. To be sure,” Skerry continues, paraphrasing Huntington, “non-Hispanic immigrants are more diverse than ever. But overall, the 50 percent of immigrants who are Hispanic make for a much less diverse cohort than ever.

For Huntington, this diminished diversity makes assimilation less likely.” And as David Kennedy observes, “the variety and dispersal of the immigrant stream” smoothed the progress of assimilation. “Today, however, one large immigrant stream is flowing into a defined region from a single cultural, linguistic, religious, and national source: Mexico ... The sobering fact is that the United States has had no experience comparable to what is now taking place in the Southwest.” By 2050, one third of the population of the United States could be Spanish-speaking.

Geography is at the forefront of these arguments. Here is Huntington: “No other immigrant group in American history has asserted or has been able to assert a historical claim to American territory. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can and do make that claim.” Most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah were part of Mexico until the 1835–36 Texan War of Independence and the 1846–48 Mexican-American War.

Consequently, as Skerry points out, Mexicans arrive in the United States, settle in areas of the country that were once part of their homeland, and so “enjoy a sense of being on their own turf” that other immigrants do not share. Huntington points out that a nation is a “remembered community”—that is, one with a historical memory of itself. Mexican-Americans are for the first time in America’s history amending our historical memory. By 2000, six of 12 important cities on the U.S. side of the border were more than 90 percent Hispanic, and only two (San Diego and Yuma, Ariz.) were less than 50 percent Hispanic.

The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part I of III)

Like it or not, Mexico is pushing north into the United States. Here is a look at the future, from a new book by Robert D. Kaplan. 

America’s foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its society, and nothing will affect that society more than the dramatic movement of Latino history northward. Mexico’s 111 million people plus Central America’s 40 million add up to half the population of the United States.

Eighty-five percent of all Mexico’s exports go to the United States, even as half of all Central America’s trade is with the U.S. While the median age of Americans is nearly 37, the median age is 25 in Mexico and even lower in Central America (20 in Guatemala and Honduras, for example). The destiny of the United States will be north–south, rather than the east–west “sea to shining sea” of continental and patriotic myth.

Half the length of America’s southern frontier is an artificial line in the desert, established by treaties following the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. I have described before how crossing this border, having traveled by bus north from Mexico City, was as much of a shock for me as crossing the Jordan-Israel border and the Berlin Wall.

Surrounded by beggars on the broken sidewalk of Nogales, Sonora, I stared at the American flag indicating the border. The pedestrian crossing point to Nogales, Ariz., was in a small building. Merely by touching the door handle, I entered a new physical world. The solidly constructed handle with its high-quality metal, the clean glass, and the precise manner in which the room’s ceramic tiles were fitted seemed a revelation after weeks amid slipshod Mexican construction.

There were only two people in the room: an immigration official and a customs official. Neither talked to the other. In government enclosures of that size in Mexico and other Third World countries, there were always crowds of officials and hangers-on, lost in animated conversation. Soon, as in Israel, I was inside a perfectly standardized yet cold and alienating environment, with empty streets and the store logos made of tony polymers rather than of rusted metal and cheap plastic.

After weeks of turbulence and semi-anarchy, these quiet streets appeared vulnerable, unnatural even. Arnold Toynbee writes, in reference to the barbarians and Rome, that when a frontier between a highly and less highly developed society “ceases to advance, the balance does not settle down to a stable equilibrium but inclines, with the passage of time, in the more backward society’s favor.”

Since 1940, Mexico’s population has risen more than fivefold. Today it has swelled to more than a third the population of the United States, and it continues to grow at a faster rate. East Coast elites display relatively little interest in Mexico, focusing instead on the wider world and America’s place in it. America’s southern neighbor registers far less in the elite imagination than does Israel or China, or India even. Yet Mexico could affect America’s destiny more than any of those countries.

Mexico exhibits no geographical unity. Two great mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Sierra Madre Oriental, lie on either side of a rugged central plateau. Then there are other, crosscutting mountain ranges, mainly in the south: the Sierra Madre del Sur, the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, and so on. Mexico is so mountainous that if it were flattened, it would be the size of Asia.

The Yucatán Peninsula and Baja California are both essentially separate from the rest of Mexico, which is itself infernally divided. This is the context to understand northern Mexico’s ongoing, undeclared, substantially unreported, and undeniable unification with the southwestern United States and consequent separation from the rest of Mexico.

Northern Mexico’s population has more than doubled since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994. The U.S. dollar is now a common unit of exchange as far south as Culiacán, halfway to Mexico City. Northern Mexico is responsible for 87 percent of all maquiladora (duty-free) manufacturing and 85 percent of all U.S.-Mexico trade.

The northeastern Mexican city of Monterrey, one of the country’s largest, is intimately connected with the Texas banking, manufacturing, and energy industries. David Danelo, a former U.S. Marine now working for U.S. customs who has studied northern Mexico extensively and has traveled throughout all six Mexican border states, told me he has yet to meet a person there with more than one degree of separation from the United States.

As he told me, “Northern Mexico retains a sense of cultural polarity; frontier norteños see themselves as the antithesis of Mexico City’s [city slicker] chilangos.”

Time to STEM The Visa Lottery?

By Tom Tancredo 9/25/2012

Immigration is often portrayed as a complex issue. In reality, it really comes down to two simple questions:

1. How many immigrants should we allow into this country?

2. How should we decide how to select those immigrants?

Currently, America accepts over one million permanent legal immigrants and nearly as many temporary workers each year. Most of these immigrants are not selected based upon their skills or what they will contribute to this country, but through the process of family reunification. I suspect that many who claim that immigration is complicated do so because they know that if the issue were to presented to the American people with simple facts, they would demand that immigration be reprioritized and reduced.

I have been amazed that, in spite of persistently high unemployment rates, the Republican leadership has failed to take any steps to try to reduce overall immigration. The closest they came was when the Judiciary Committee approved the bipartisan SAFE For America Act last year to eliminate the 55,000 visas issued each year through the Diversity Visa Lottery.

Perhaps the most insane aspect of the Diversity Lottery is that it grants thousands of visas to terrorist supporting countries including Iran, Syria and Sudan. Mohammed Atta, the 9-11 mastermind, attempted to receive a visa through this process. He was not selected, but other terrorists such as LAX shooter Hesham Mohamed Hedayet, who killed 2 Americans, and Detroit sleeper cell member Karim Koubriti entered this country on a visa they obtained from the lottery. (So much for those background checks.)

Getting rid of the Diversity Visa Lottery should be a no-brainer, but unfortunately the House Leadership never put the SAFE For America Act up for a vote. Last week, however, the House voted on Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-TX) STEM Jobs Act, which would reallocate the 55,000 diversity lottery visas to immigrants in working in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.

While this is no doubt an improvement over the Diversity Lottery, I am not convinced that we need these additional workers. We should allow the best and brightest of the World into this country (and in fact, we already have unlimited O-1 visas for such people), but Americans in all sectors of the economy are struggling to find work.

According to the recent study Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings put out by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, 8.2% computer and mathematics, 7.5% of engineering, 7.7% of science majors who recently graduated from college are unemployed.

Because Republicans tried to fast track the STEM Jobs Act, they needed 2/3 of the House to pass it. Virtually all of the Democrats voted against it and it failed to get the required votes. If I were still in Congress, I would probably vote for the bill, because STEM Visas are relatively saner than the Diversity Lottery.

It is nice to know that they are taking some baby steps into thinking about how we should select immigrants. However, this does not change the fact that Republicans in Congress need to start addressing overall immigration numbers.

Obviously Colorado Did Not Heed This Recommendation

No on 64: Don’t Invite Cartels

By Craig Steiner 10/11/2012

Voters of Colorado should vote NO on amendment 64, a proposal to legalize marijuana in Colorado.

Voters should not treat this as only a question on the merits of marijuana legalization but rather on whether Colorado would be wise to make marijuana legal in the state even as it remains illegal in the rest of the country.

If our state becomes the only state in the nation to legalize marijuana, criminal organizations are more likely to set up shop in Colorado. Just as reducing taxes attracts legitimate businesses to the state, reducing criminal sanctions on marijuana while other states keep those sanctions in place will attract cartels that deal in marijuana to Colorado.

The cartels would come to Colorado not necessarily to sell marijuana within the state, but to use our state as a central point of production and distribution to export to other states without the inconvenience of international border controls that currently exist. This probability is increased by the fact that Colorado is centrally located within the mid-west and is a short 8-hour drive from Cd. Juarez--the most violent city in Mexico.

Once cartels set up major operations here, they could replicate their business model in our communities--branching out into other illegal enterprises such as kidnapping for ransom, human trafficking, extortion/protection payments from businesses, and corruption of government and law enforcement officials. In many Mexican cities, law-abiding residents no longer venture out of their homes at night for fear of their safety.

Having lived for a decade in Mexico and returning to the United States just as things began to get ugly a number of years ago, I can attest to how quickly things can fall apart when cartels proliferate. In the space of just a few months, the Mexican city in which I lived went from being as peaceful as Denver to having daily killings and massacres as cartels fought over turf. And being the only state to legalize marijuana, Colorado would be very attractive "turf."

As long as marijuana is illegal in the rest of the country, legalizing it in Colorado can only serve to make Colorado more attractive to international criminal organizations. Legalizing marijuana in Colorado won't reduce crime, but rather almost guarantees that drug cartels would come--along with increased violence and crime.

Citizens of Colorado must vote NO on amendment 64 and reject a proposal that would attract violent cartels and crime to our state.

The Complacency of America

By Jeff Carter 9/24/2012

Talking to a lot of my friends, they don’t get it. How can anyone possibly support Obama? Even if you are a Democrat, how can you? He was elected on the promise to cut the deficit, and to work with the other party.

Remember, “Team of Rivals”? But it’s not enough to say Obama didn’t live up to any of his promises. That’s too transparent. Politicians are made to break promises.

Knowing American History, we have a lot of things in common with the British. A lot of our DNA is ensconced still in the first settlers that successfully established here. Even the colonists knew when they were fighting the British, they were inherently British.

I think I have found the answer in a book by Carlo D’Este. Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill. Here is a quote from the book that rings true today. He writes, “his friend Harold Nicholson’s observation: ‘The British, except in moments of danger, are a lethargic race; they do not care for stimulants, they prefer sedatives. They are distrustful of brilliance. They feel more at ease with what they call, “sound common sense”. Their optimism, which in a crisis becomes a source of strength, degenerates in neutral periods into an ardent desire to believe nothing unpleasant is likely to occur. Their motto in such periods is “safety first”. And Churchill never believed that safety is the highest aim of human endeavour.”

Americans have become complacent. Uncertainty will do that to you.

Obama’s administration has deliberately created uncertainty in almost all things. Economics, Foreign Policy, Banking, Healthcare. American’s don’t know who to believe, or what to believe. The media shields them from the mathematical comeuppance that is right around the corner.

Many Americans don’t have a clue about the coming debt crisis, and the massive increase in taxes they are about to get-nor the consequences of those events. They are passive-or worse yet think the rich will rally and bail them out.

The bad news is, the rich aren’t rich enough to do anything about it. When the dyke breaks, it’s over.

Somehow, someway, if the clear eyed realists can convince Americans that something truly tragic has been building up for 50 years now is about to really change the way of American life, they might awaken. But many are so cynical they won’t believe it-until it happens.

Wars are sometimes like that. Look at Great Britain in the late 1930's.

Economics is like that. Look at America today. You don’t go broke slowly. It happens all at once.

Silent Scream

By Scottie Hughes Townhall.com 10/23/2012

This is not about the 1960’s book Silent Spring, written by the environmentalist Rachael Carson.  It is about the 1960’s people who read the book and who fought against the pesticides released in the environment about which Carson wrote.  Now known as the Baby Boomers, they went on to fight against civil rights injustice and fight against the Viet Nam war.  

It is about a group of people who read Hegel and Marx.  

They were misguided but willing, in their youthful idealism, to stand up and protest the perceived wrongs they saw occurring in their country and their culture. They became the teachers and Professors in our Universities.  They trained and taught the next generation of Americans, who are the Obama voters today. Looking back now it is apparent that the push towards Socialism which drove this 60’s revolution, was actually the sword of Damocles which Barak Obama has used skillfully to destroy this country.  It is from these people, the Boomers, whose head the sword hangs over, that a silent scream can be heard.

What will this people, the Baby Boomers reap?  They will reap the whirlwind.  

Not only is the Boomer generation suffering because of their Marxist ideologies but they are suffering at the hands of their offspring.  The socialist push, so pervasive in the Obama administration, has fallen on complacent if not compliant ears.  These are the Americans, in their twenties and thirties that have been nursed on the tit of Karl Marx. They have very little knowledge of history and very little patriotism.  They are the New World Order socialist global citizens.

As a reaction to this, Americans en masse are leaving this country to become part of the growing expatiate population.  They are leaving because this country has become foreign to the traditional values and culture American life encapsulated.  What started in the 60’s as a protest has now become a way of life by at least half of the country.  

Easy/ breezy at the government’s expense, is the new lifestyle. The trade off, for real Americans is too uncomfortable to walk out.  So walk out, is what thousands of Americans are choosing to do.  Everyday, ordinary people, middle class families are leaving the United States.

From where my parents live in Middle Tennessee they can throw a stone and hit six to eight families that have left the United States, or are in the process of leaving to go to Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Belize.  When you ask them what their primary motivation is to leave this country, they will tell you Freedom.  

You see, Americans love their Freedom.  It is our flagpole from which we fly the American flag; the flag that the President won’t wear in his lapel or salute.  

Real Americans become claustrophobic when we perceive our freedom is limited in our vast Constitutional boundaries.  When I go to the airport and my four year old daughter is patted down and touched by a stranger, her freedom is violated.  When my speech is censured or restricted, then my freedom is violated.  When my husband could be put on some kind of list because he owns a firearm, his freedom is violated.  

When my grandmother has a death panel decide, because of her age, she cannot have a treatment or procedure that might give her a little more time of her precious life, then her freedom is violated. Everyday American’s freedoms are being violated in thousands of ways.  Americans are tired of it and are leaving.

My heart is deeply saddened right now as I watch an elderly couple that I have known and loved since I was a child.  They are in their 70’s and are the pillars of society, people who are the backbone of this great country.  They are selling their furniture, family heirlooms, jewelry and condensing their 70 some years of life, down to ten boxes and two suitcases.  

They have health issues.  They are on a limited social security. They can no longer afford to live in this country.  They have no options but to leave and will be moving to Ecuador. They will be leaving behind, children, grandchildren and everyone they know and love. They are going off by themselves to a foreign country.  

These people had fathers, grandfathers and family fight in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Viet Nam. The husband is a Vanderbilt graduate and served his time in the Navy during the Viet Nam war. All the men in this solid American family fought for their descendents future freedom.  

How these men would grieve to see this day that one of their own has to leave this country.  They would have never believed that Americans would have become so complacent as to allow our basic Constitutional freedoms to become disregarded without a fight.  

It’s a silent scream from the graves of these brave ancestors that will become louder and louder, as the expatriate movement grows.  

God help us.

Vote next Tuesday…This Election is Critical!

This will be my last article before next Tuesday's election, and my last as a writers group member. Many thanks to the Spectrum newspaper for providing this forum enabling citizens like my self to express ourselves on topics of interest.

Next week's election could very well be the most important of our lifetime and I urge all registered voters to perform your civic duty regardless of political persuasion. To those of you that sit on the sidelines and let others choose who represents your interests and make the decisions that impact your future, I say… shame on you.

The old refrain; "my one vote doesn't matter", is not true. The richest man in America, the President and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court all have only one vote and your one vote can cancel any of theirs. All those single votes combine for a potential majority and can change the course of history.

In 2010 only 51% of Utah's registered voters went to the polls. In this 2012 presidential cycle, the percentage is likely to exceed 75%. The interest is high and so too are the stakes. The differences in the Republicans and Democrats and their presidential candidates are stark so it is easy to compare and make a choice…let's do so.

In the past four years, the Democratic team led by President Obama and his gaffe prone Vice President has brought our nation its first ever credit downgrade, record debt (now exceeding $16 trillion), record numbers of welfare and food stamp recipients and several scandals that include the incompetence that led to the deaths of our Ambassador and three other Americans at the Benghazi consulate. The Democratic team has also brought us higher gas and food prices, a lower standard of living, and a huge bureaucratic government.

The Democrats are the pander party. They pander to the poor using class warfare in promising to re-distribute the wealth. They pander to homosexuals by advocating for gays in the military and same-sex marriage. They pander to the environmentalists by cutting drilling permits off-shore and on public lands, by wasting taxpayer's money on failed solar enterprises and by stopping the job and energy producing XL pipeline. Democrats also pander big time to the labor unions, minorities, atheists and abortionists.

The Republican team has a different vision for America and has asked for an opportunity to restore our country's fiscal and moral integrity. This team is led by a proven and successful "fix it" businessman who knows how to balance a budget and running mate known for his expertise in all areas of fiscal and economic responsibility.

Be wary of a lame duck Obama Administration. Remember what Obama whispered to Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev that was meant for his ears only, "After my election, I will have more flexibility". What did he share with the Russians that he did not want to share with the American people? And what is he whispering to other world leaders?

Make sure you vote next Tuesday.

Billy Tedreck

Enemy Next Door

By George H. Wittman The American Spectator

How much more evidence does the Administration need?

The Mexican drug wars have become an old story. Media of all types have given extensive coverage to the battles between and among criminal gangs and federal police and military. Nonetheless, the Obama Administration has continued a policy of avoiding recognition of the danger of the open warfare that exists immediately south of the United States border with Mexico.

The federal and state governments of Mexico have reacted quickly to deny commentary that challenges their commitment to enforcing law and order in their jurisdictions. From Washington comes an active effort to counter any claims by local law enforcement in the Southwest that suggest any increase in trafficking in narcotics and human smuggling.

After organizing Department of Justice lawyers to bring the State of Arizona to court over their law attempting to enforce existing federal statutes on illegal immigration, the Obama White House has done everything it could to play to the politics of the Spanish-heritage population in the United States. This has included downplaying the power wielded by Mara Salvatrucha (MS 13) and the other Hispanic gangs in major cities throughout the U.S. and their organization in American prison societies.

The Administration's unwillingness to deploy major units of federalized National Guard troops to inhibit illegal border crossing was first thought to be some form of economy measure and/or turf conflict with the Department of Homeland Security.

It has turned out, however, to be in response to Mexico's President Felipe Calderon's fear that a heavily armed U.S. border would be deemed by his political opponents as an indication of his government's weakness against American attempts to preempt Mexican sovereignty. Desirous of supporting Calderon, President Obama's domestic strategists found a device to once again create a seemingly logical decision out of a false premise.

Buttressed by the political elements of the American Hispanic community that do not want the Mexico/US border restricted in any form, the White House has chosen to pretend there actually is a lessening of Mexican drug-related action spilling over into the United States. This in spite of the fact the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, who is also president of the state's sheriffs association, has regularly reported continued and even increased traffic of armed smuggling teams through his and nearby counties.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that they had deported a total of 24,950 convicted criminals from Arizona through July of 2010 out of 66,000 illegal immigrants sent back across the border. It appears a reasonable assumption that a substantial number of the nearly 25,000 deported criminals had drug connections.

Scott Stewart, who closely follows narcotics trafficking issues for the authoritative analysis service, Stratfor, reports there has been a "persistent rumor" that the Sinaloa cartel has had Mexican federal government protection. In the same manner the story has grown in acceptance that the Juarez cartel wanted American intervention in order to block the Sinaloa from extending its operations into Juarez territory. The Juarez operation has been badly hit by a combination of Sinaloa and Mexican military action. How coordinated this was has not been revealed, but the Juarez leadership believes the joint government/Sinaloa efforts against them have been obvious. Official figures of the Mexican authorities show over 9,000 drug battle deaths on all sides so far this year.

The contemporary history of the involvement of professional military and drug gangs is marked by the fact that the Los Zetas, now aligned with the Juarez and remnants of the Tijuana cartel, was originally created by deserters from the Mexican Army Special Forces Group. There are reports that the remnant of this original crew is now aided by Guatemala street gangs of MS-13 along with teams of ex-members of Guatemala Special Forces. Meanwhile the Sinaloa cartel has allied with La Familia Michoacana (LFM) and the Gulf cartel to form an umbrella group called the New Federation that aims to destroy the Los Zetas and take over the Juarez territories. Here is where the outreach into the U.S. becomes more clear.

The LFM of the New Federation made its entrée into the U.S. scene several years ago in Chicago. La Familia Michoacana had surfaced as drug traffickers in the U.S. matching Los Angeles-based MS-13 cooptees, Barrio Azteca (the American wing of the Mexican Azteca) and an eponymous group known as Mexican Mafia. The Drug Enforcement Agency tracked LFM connections to Dallas, Atlanta and on to major mid-western cities. The principal activity of LFM is in end use delivery. The New Federation's other participating cartels of Gulf and Sinaloa have their own extensive lines into the U.S.

The Mexican drug cartels have brought sophistication and financial power to their American operations that they now run as wholly owned subsidiaries. The war between the New Federation and the Zetas, Juarez, and Tijuana groups without a doubt spills over into the U.S. This violence exists in order to protect their respective distribution routes. Nonetheless, for obvious political reasons the Washington administration wants to underplay these connections and pretend that the drug wars of Mexico do not cross over into the U.S. and thus have no appreciable impact on the northern side of the border.

What further evidence does the Obama administration require to prove the need for a major commitment to border security -- and against human and narcotics trafficking?