Sad, Sad News

I left Smithtown, Long Island, in 1967 when I to college. Smithtown is a pretty quiet burg so it is rare that I see anything in the news from there. Today I was surprised and not happy at all to see this. From the NY Post:

A Purple Heart recipient survived a deadly suicide attack in Afghanistan, only to perish today in a violent car crash at his own birthday party in Long Island, officials said.

Smithtown resident Seamus Byrne, 33, had been celebrating his big day with friends at Napper Tandy’s Irish Pub and was walking home at 1:45 a.m. when he was hit.

Byrne, who lived just a half-mile away from the pub, was in the cross walk headed home but realizing he had forgotten to say good night to one well-wisher, according to father-in-law James Gallagher.

When Byrne turned back, that’s when a 1998 Honda driven by Michael Armentano, 24, also of Smithtown, plowed into the vet, cops said.


Armentano has no priors and was not impaired, officials said. Cops are still investigating, but have so far ruled the tragic crash as an accident.

“He was just a really good guy, full if vigor and he loved his family,” Gallagher said of his fallen son-in-law. “It’s a tragedy.”

Byrne, a member of the Army National Guard’s Fighting 69th Infantry Regiment, was deployed to Afghanistan in January, 2008, his family said.

He was in a Humvee when a suicide bomber attacked nearby, killing nine and severely injuring Byrne.

Read more here.

Islam In Action: Model Muslim Career Women

Our Southern Sieve With Mexico

Jose Madrigal

Mexican Rapist deported nine times

While the idiots in charge of the Department of Homeland Security stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "Our borders are secure," criminals from other nations cross our borders with little or no government interference to wreck havoc on Americans. In 2009, nearly a thousand dangerous illegal aliens were released into our communities from jails and correctional facilities without any intervention by federal authorities to deport them.

(CNSNews.com) - Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) failed to identify more than 800 criminal alien convicts eligible for deportation before they were released from U.S. prisons, including “many” of “the most egregious criminal aliens, who pose a significant pubic safety risk,” according to a report by the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

According to the report [2], released on Feb. 4, ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, or CAP, “is responsible for identifying criminal aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons and jails who are eligible for removal from the United States.”

Actually, the way that DHS runs our borders, it doesn't make much of a difference whether or not they're deported, but more on that later.

In fiscal year 2009, CAP failed to identify 890 criminal aliens eligible for removal from the United States, according to the report. These criminals had been incarcerated in facilities in Texas and California and were released back into U.S. society.

A criminal alien eligible for removal is a person who is in the United States illegally and is subsequently convicted of a crime or was a legal permanent residents convicted of a removable offense, such as murder and other felonies.

Here's the money quote; the ICE Inspector General's report identifies nearly a half million illegal alien criminals a year that are subject to deportation. What the hell are these people doing here in the first place?

ICE agents “do not always record and retain critical information and documentation used to determine the status of foreign-born inmates incarcerated in federal and state prisons,” the report stated. “This is because ICE procedures do not require agents to record and retain such information.”

“As a result, ICE is unable to provide assurance that its [Criminal Alien Program] agents are screening all potentially removable foreign-born inmates incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities,” the report continued.

According to the IG report, the screening under the criminal alien removal program refers to “electronic records check and interview that [ICE] agents may conduct to determine if a foreign-born inmate is removable.”

[...] “ICE estimates that 300,000 to 450,000 criminal aliens who are eligible for removal are detained each year at federal, state, and local correctional facilities,” the IG report stated.

The blog, Vital Signs, describes one particular Mexican who makes mockery of our borders, our laws and feeds on our citizens.

Last October I posted here on Vital Signs Blog about Jose Lopez Madrigal, a Mexican citizen who had recently arrested for raping a young, "slightly disabled" woman in Edmonds, Washington.

I pointed out that, "Once investigators worked their way through Madrigal's 30 aliases, they discovered he had an incredible criminal record dating back to 1989 and ranging all over the western part of the United States. His previous crimes have included theft, theft using a firearm, several drug and drug sales crimes, and sexual assault.

So why isn't he behind bars? Well, in part it's because judges have decided to deport him rather than jail him. But with the laughable security measures of our borders, Madrigal just comes back whenever he feels like it to prey on American citizens again.

Jose Lopez Madrigal has been deported from the U.S. back to Mexico...get ready...9 times!

It's hardly surprising that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement refuses to comment on the case.

In a postmodern, post-Christian America there is no accountability by the government; we are just wage slaves whose sole purpose in life is to feed the politicians and their bloated, useless government bureaucracy. The following is one of the elements of postmodernism (from the University of Colorado):

Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.

Forget conscience and duty and morality as defined by Scripture as the French did in their ill-fated 18th century revolution.

After executing Louis VIV in 1793, the French promoted "reason" as their standard for governing, even honoring a "Goddess of Reason" - it lead to the Reign of Terror and slaughter. Apparently the slaughter of American citizens on our own soil by foreign nationals is of no concern to the US government.

Mario Montalban-Ramirez, 61, was convicted of manslaughter in Illinois in 1982, convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and sent back to his native Mexico three times -- in 1996, 1997 and 2003 -- for being in the United States illegally. He also has been a frequent customer in local jails, locked up for such offenses as DWI, theft, assault and being a fugitive from justice.

This is beyond insanity. This is evil incompetence or deliberate malfeasance on behalf of liberals who worship the Goddess of Reason.

UPDATE:

A romantic relationship that soured sparked a Manassas man to fatally shoot his ex-girlfriend and two other people and wound three more in a shocking spate of violence that shattered a close-knit neighborhood, authorities said Friday.

Jose Oswaldo Reyes-Alfaro, 37, a Salvadoran national who was in the country illegally, was armed with a .38-caliber revolver when he went to the Hood Road townhouse he shared with Brenda Ashcraft, 56, just after 7 p.m. Thursday, according to police and court records. After fatally shooting Ashcraft's son and wounding two other family members, including a teenage girl, he shot Ashcraft in the head as she tried to dial 911, police said.

Reyes-Alfaro then went to a house just blocks away and used the last bullet in the revolver to kill his friend Julio Cesar Ulloa, 48, court records say. Using a large knife or machete, he cut Ulloa's 77-year-old landlady in the head, the records say.

Need we say more?

Ronald McDonald Presiding

If I tremble at the lack of talent and intellect that is prevalent in our college graduates, I quake at the thought of what is coming out of our law schools, for these are our future judges. From the Wall Street Journal:

Judge Roger Vinson's order last week declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional has prompted a pair of op-eds by professors at elite law schools: Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, in the Los Angeles Times, and Laurence Tribe of Harvard, in the New York Times. Both profs claim ObamaCare is constitutional.

We were going to write "argue" rather than "claim," but we think that may be too generous. Neither article is a serious piece of legal analysis, because both professors simply refuse to take seriously the legal arguments on the other side, even after those arguments have been accepted by two federal trial judges. Rather than grapple with a novel legal issue in a serious scholarly way, it's as if they stick their fingers in their ears and sing "Law law law law law."

Amar's piece is just insulting. He opens by declaring: "My students understand the Constitution better than the judge," and closes by likening Vinson's order to (we're not kidding) the infamous Dred Scott case: "In 1857, another judge named Roger distorted the Constitution, disregarded precedent, disrespected Congress and proclaimed that the basic platform of one of America's two major political parties was unconstitutional."

There's no way our liberties can survive under the onslaught of an activist judicial system, a socialist President and a Congress full of raving liberals. The system of checks and balances falls apart and tyranny is the ultimate result.

[...] Tribe claims that the judges who overturned ObamaCare "made the confused assertion that what is at stake here is a matter of personal liberty--the right not to purchase what one wishes not to purchase--rather than the reach of national legislative power." That is false. Both judges concluded that Congress had exceeded its constitutional power, not that it had violated an individual constitutional right.

And these clowns are law professors!

As the old adage goes, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

Benedict Obama

The recent WikiLeak enabled revelation that Obama compromised Britian's national security really should not surprise us. I cannot imagine anything more calculated to infuriate a valuable, trusted ally. Congress should immediately initiate an investigation as to the legality of this treachery.

Thank you 52%'ers.

And So It Begins

I remember the sage advice given that cautions against blogging while angry or drunk. I don't drink anymore and I am not angry; well - at least I am not throwing things against the wall, but I just got notification in the mail that the federal witholding taken out of my pension has increased by over 56%, effective immediately.

I thought that I'd be able for awhile to duck and dodge the Hope 'n Change that I knew would eventually find me. Guess not.