“Madam Speaker, it is my understanding that President Obama’s decision regarding the release into the United States of a number of Uyghur detainees held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 could be imminent. The New York Times, ABC News and others news outlets have reported that the president will soon release these terrorists into the United States, and yet this Congress has yet to be briefed on this decision. This is unacceptable.
“Let’s be clear: these terrorists would not be held in prisons but released into neighborhoods. They should not be released at all into the United States. Do Members realize who these people are? There have been published reports that the Uyghurs were members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, a designated terrorist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Via Instapundit I was directed to this post over at The Volokh Conspiracy detailing convictions in the Ohio voter fraud trials of people who came there to illegal double-vote for Obama. From the linked Columbus Dispatch story:
A Franklin County judge told three out-of-state campaigners for Barack Obama who voted here illegally that they should have known better.
The three chose Ohio over their home states — where Obama was likely to win — because they wanted to swing the Electoral College vote toward their candidate, Common Pleas Judge Charles A. Schneider said.
He ordered a year’s probation, a $1,000 fine and a 60-day suspended jail sentence for Daniel “Tate” Hausman, 32, and Amy Little, 50, both of New York, and Yolanda Hippensteele, 30, of California.
All were paid staff members for Vote Today Ohio, an independent get-out-the-vote organization supporting the Democratic presidential candidate.
One of those convicted, Yolanda Hippensteele, now has “some fear that this [conviction] will impact my reputation.” Well, yeah, Ms. Hippensteele, it’s supposed to affect your reputation. Your reputation is that you purposely attempted to defraud the voting process and you shouldn’t be trusted around politics, not one iota. You and your Obama-supporting company are precisely what you’ve been screaming your heads off about for 8 years: frauds. Live with it.
Directly below that on the Volokh page was this video on YouTube that sums up the little budget theater Obama put on a couple of weeks about when he made such a deal of cutting $100 million out of the budget. This one explains it very well.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a man on a mission: to hear what teachers, students and parents in at least 15 states think about No Child Left Behind, the controversial education law championed by former President George W. Bush.
Duncan is visiting schools in West Virginia Tuesday, the first stop in the first steps toward reviewing and reforming the program.
President Barack Obama has pledged to overhaul the law, but he has been vague about how far he would go, or whether he would scrap it altogether.
Scrapping it completely would be music to the ears of many conservatives I know, a sensation I’m equally sure they’d be unfamiliar with recognizing when it came to an Obama initiative. NCLB was a Bush program that never sat well with lots of folks on my end of the political spectrum. It centralized and federalized control of the education of our youth, taking it further and further away from the control of the people and specifically the parents of those children.
On the other hand, why should we not be insisting on a set of minimum criteria for what kids have to know to graduate? A high school diploma should be seen in the same light as many of the professional certifications in my industry are: a sign that the person holding the cert knows a certain set of knowledge.
I think there are ways of achieving this state without the huge expansion of a federal agency and without exporting control of the school curricula to DC bureaucrats. In truth, I don’t think any thought was given to how this could be done before someone made the call for the DoE to start running the show. Perhaps we can do that now. As I said, this is an interesting development and one we should watch closely.
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