Category Archives: common core education

Entire VA System Broken, Moment of Reckoning

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Eric Shinseki could not fix it, Robert McDonald cant fix it, $60 billion cant fix it. The culture, the bureaucracy and leadership is at issue, either take it out of all government hands or put it into the Department of Defense. It may save a life or it may or it may restore a life.

Either way, a solution is at hand, the WILL to do it must be reckoned today.

VA Needs ‘Systemwide Reworking,’ Independent Report Finds
Congressionally mandated independent review of Veterans Affairs health-care system identifies widespread problems

WSJ: A sweeping independent review of the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system made public Friday shows the multibillion-dollar agency has significant flaws, including a bloated bureaucracy, problems with leadership and a potentially unsustainable capital budget.

More than a dozen assessments—from analysts including Mitre Corp., Rand Corp. and McKinsey & Co.—show that the Veterans Heath Administration, the health-care arm of the department known as VHA, is still plagued by long-standing issues, including unsustainable costs in the future and a system that veterans find tough to navigate.

The assessments, weighing in at more than 4,000 pages total, were mandated by the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act, commonly known as the Veterans Choice Act, a more than $16 billion emergency funding measure passed last summer in the wake of a systemwide scandal at the VA that led to the resignation of a number of top officials, including then-Secretary Eric Shinseki. They appear to restate, more thoroughly, many issues that have been previously identified. The assessments will be used by the Commission on Care, also mandated by the act, which is tasked with presenting the VA and Congress a comprehensive reform plan in early 2016.

“The report bears out collectively what I have seen individually, what I have seen in my role as chairman over the past nine months,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “There is a huge focus on some glaring deficiencies that need to be addressed.”
Mr. Isakson said the VA suffers especially from a system saddled with a number of different departments that can’t effectively talk with each other, as well as a number of vacancies in leadership positions that need to be filled, though he said the department has been working to correct a number of issues.

“VA is undergoing a radical transformation,” the department said in response to the findings, pointing out a number of efforts to address problems highlighted in the assessments. “VA will work with Congress, veterans service organizations, veterans, and other stakeholders on the recommendations outlined in the Independent Assessment Final Report. VA will especially work closely with Congress on those final report recommendations that specify specific congressional action needed to implement.”

The assessments found VA care outperformed non-VA care by many measures but also showed a system that needs even more change.

“The independent assessment highlighted systemic, critical problems,” the report said. “Solving these problems will demand far-reaching and complex changes that, when taken together, amount to no less than a systemwide reworking of VHA.”

With an annual budget of some $60 billion, 1,600 health-care sites and 300,000 employees, the VHA says it is the largest integrated health-care system in the U.S. Last year, nearly 6 million veterans were treated in the system.

The reports portray the VA as a huge operation that has become difficult to steer and permeated by a bureaucratic system plagued by mismanagement and inconsistent care from hospital to hospital.

“It’s pretty bad for VHA, it’s pretty stinging,” said a senior staff member of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “There’s nothing in here that has surprised me, but seeing it all in one place is probably the hardest thing.”

“They’ll push out a directive and they won’t follow-up to see how it’s implemented,” the congressional staffer said, adding that a large number of leadership positions in the organization remain unfilled or staffed by interim employees.

The report shows that the central office has grown 160% over the past five years, yet key leadership positions down the chain remain empty. More than half of the executives in the organization are eligible for retirement and could leave at any time, which could create even more leadership gaps.

The lengthy and critical reports come as the VA faces questions over whether it should allow more veterans to go outside of the system to receive private care. Recently, according to the assessments, health care obtained outside of the VA accounts for about 10% of VHA expenditures. The Veterans Choice Act of last year was built in large part around funding this type of care.

Questions about further privatization were highlighted recently when Ben Carson, a leading Republican presidential candidate and physician, suggested the VA make a push toward privatization and elimination of the VHA, its health-care delivery arm.

Earlier this week, a number of major veterans groups sent an open letter to Mr. Carson stressing the need to keep the VHA solvent.

The assessments released Friday unfavorably compared the VA’s management style to a number of private health-care providers like Kaiser Permanente.

Sen. Isakson said the Veterans Choice Act, which allows veterans more leeway in seeking care outside the VA, was an emergency measure and not something meant to steer the VA down a privatized path. “The Choice program, contrary to what everyone thought, was not a sinister program to privatize the VA.”

Robert McDonald, who took over as VA secretary last summer, has been praised by many in Congress as well as most major veterans groups for his efforts to reform the VA and his willingness to listen to patients and workers. But he has also been criticized for things like moving too slowly in firing underperforming employees and not supporting efforts to create an environment where employees can point out wrongdoing in the department. Mr. McDonald has said multiple times in the past that he is forcing out bad actors as quickly as possible.

“As a general matter, the president has made it a priority to ensure that America’s veterans are getting the kind of health care and benefits they have so richly earned,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday, saying he had not seen the substance of the report.

Mr. Earnest said that some of the reforms at the VA have already begun to show progress in improving care.

“But the president, Secretary McDonald and other senior officials at the VA are not going to rest until we have accomplished our goal of making sure that all our veterans are getting the kind of care that they deserve, on time,” Mr. Earnest said.

On Thursday, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog tasked with protecting government employees, especially whistleblowers, sent a letter to President Barack Obama criticizing what they said was the VA’s reluctance to take disciplinary action against officials responsible for inadequate patient care.

“I have identified recent additional cases in which the VA confirmed serious misconduct brought to light by whistleblowers, yet failed to appropriately discipline responsible officials,” said Carolyn Lerner, the head of the office. Her office criticized the VA for punishing whistleblowers while not punishing those who engaged in misconduct.

“Over the past year, the Department of Veterans Affairs has worked closely and in good faith with the Office of Special Counsel to correct deficiencies in the department’s processes and programs to ensure fair treatment for any whistleblower who raises a hand to identify a problem, make a suggestion or report what may be a violation in law,” the department said in a statement.

Access to VA care has increased dramatically since the mid-1990s, the report said, as changes in policy opened up the system to include not just combat-wounded veterans but many others who have served. Former Secretary Shinseki pushed to have veterans take advantage of their benefits and increased access to those like Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

Although the VA has other departments, including a benefits arm, the VHA accounts for nearly 90% of the department’s discretionary budget and employee base. While the total population of veterans in the U.S. peaked around 1980 at 30 million and has declined since then, according to the report, demand for VA care has been steadily increasing as greater numbers of vets take advantage of benefits. The number of enrollees and patients isn’t expected to peak until 2019.

More Facts on Migrants in Europe

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SoS, John Kerry had a meeting with Hammond, the UK Foreign Minister. Among many topics, Syria was discussed:

Hammond: We have, of course, talked primarily this morning about the situation in Syria and the migration crisis that is affecting Europe, and we’ve talked about how to move forward with our partners in response to recent developments in Syria to tackle the growing threat from ISIL and to ensure that we’re joined up between our actions in Iraq and our actions in Syria.

Kerry:

With respect to Syria, obviously, we spent a significant amount of time and we covered a lot of territory today. As the foreign secretary said, we talked about Yemen, where we urged the parties to get to negotiations. We talked about Libya, where hope that the work of Bernardino Leon will bear fruit. But obviously, there are challenges, and we call on the house of representatives to return to that process and to recognize this is a critical moment. And ISIL and other extremist groups take advantage of a vacuum, and a vacuum is what is left if there is not an agreement. So we need for the sake of the 6 million citizens of Libya, where there is great opportunity and significant wealth available to be able to help that country bind its wounds and move forward. We hope that they will make the right choices in the days ahead.

With respect to Syria, the foreign secretary and I agreed completely on the urgency of nations coming together in order to resolve this war that has gone on for much too long. And it is clear that the challenge to continental Europe, but to everybody, of the migrant population of refugees seeking a better life cannot be properly addressed just by addressing the numbers of refugees coming into a country or providing more support to them; it has to be addressed by dealing with the root cause, which is the violence in Syria and the lack of hope and possibility of a future that so many people in that region feel as a consequence of the violence that’s taking place.

The full meeting readout is here.

*** Deeper facts:

In part: DailyMail, includes photo essay

Four out of five migrants are NOT from Syria: EU figures expose the ‘lie’ that the majority of refugees are fleeing war zone 

  • Some 44,000 of the 213,000 refugees who arrived in Europe were from Syria
  • A further 27,000 new arrivals on the continent came from Afghanistan
  • Britain received one in 30 of all the asylum claims made by new applicants
  • David Cameron has offered to take in 20,000 refugees but none from the EU

Only one in every five migrants claiming asylum in Europe is from Syria.

The EU logged 213,000 arrivals in April, May and June but only 44,000 of them were fleeing the Syrian civil war.

Campaigners and left-wing MPs have suggested the vast majority of migrants are from the war-torn state, accusing the Government of doing too little to help them.

‘This exposes the lie peddled in some quarters that vast numbers of those reaching Europe are from Syria,’ said David Davies, Tory MP for Monmouth. ‘Most people who are escaping the war will go to camps in Lebanon or Jordan.

‘Many of those who have opted to risk their lives to come to Europe have done so for economic reasons.’

The figures from Eurostat, the EU’s official statistical agency, show that migration from April to June was running at double the level of the same period in 2014.

The number of Afghans lodging asylum claims is up four-fold, from 6,300 to 27,000. Another 17,700 claims were made by Albanians, whose country is at peace.

A further 13,900 applicants came from Iraq which, like Syria, is being torn apart by the Islamic State terror group.

Sample individual stories: From Voice of America

One is a sixth-grader who braved walks through Balkan forests to join his brother in England; another fought the Taliban while serving Afghan forces in Helmand; a third spent years working in Turkey to cover a human smuggler’s fee.

They are Afghanistan’s latest diaspora, refugees of raging war and shrunken economic prospects, swept up in the largest flood of migrants Europe has seen in more than 70 years.

Until their numbers were eclipsed by refugees from the Syrian war last year, Afghanistan had produced more refugees than any other nation thanks to more than three decades of intractable conflict.

While the majority of prior Afghan refugees made new lives in Pakistan and Iran, United Nations data say nearly 80,000 Afghans are now officially seeking asylum in Europe — the highest rate in 20 years.

Their exodus has only increased as a resurgent Taliban wages its bloodiest offensive in 14 years.

Drawn by the promise of a better life, many tapped into their life’s savings and money from family already in Europe to pay smugglers to spirit them across six countries. The less well-off risked the journey alone.

VOA Afghan Service anchor Ahmad Fawad Lami traveled to Hungary and Serbia where he caught up with many Afghan refugees just as Austria briefly opened its border.

These are just a few of their stories. A must read.

Dawa Jaan Sahil

Census Bureau, Fleecing Taxpayers

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It was immediate in the Obama administration that the White House took control, the first time ever of the Census Bureau. The motivation for that decision will be under scrutiny and debated for a long time, but the fleecing of the taxpayer seeped into that agency as well.

John Fund, WSJ: President Obama said in his inaugural address that he planned to “restore science to its rightful place” in government. That’s a worthy goal. But statisticians at the Commerce Department didn’t think it would mean having the director of next year’s Census report directly to the White House rather than to the Commerce secretary, as is customary. “There’s only one reason to have that high level of White House involvement,” a career professional at the Census Bureau tells me. “And it’s called politics, not science.”

The decision was made last week after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House that Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head Commerce, couldn’t be trusted to conduct a complete Census. The National Association of Latino Officials said it had “serious questions about his willingness to ensure that the 2010 Census produces the most accurate possible count.”

Anything that threatens the integrity of the Census has profound implications. Not only is it the basis for congressional redistricting, it provides the raw data by which government spending is allocated on everything from roads to schools. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also uses the Census to prepare the economic data that so much of business relies upon. “If the original numbers aren’t as hard as possible, the uses they’re put to get fuzzier and fuzzier,” says Bruce Chapman, who was director of the Census in the 1980s.

Mr. Chapman worries about a revival of the effort led by minority groups after the 2000 Census to adjust the totals for states and cities using statistical sampling and computer models. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Department of Commerce v. U.S. House that sampling could not be used to reapportion congressional seats. But it left open the possibility that sampling could be used to redraw political boundaries within the states. More here.

Watchdog finds widespread fraud at U.S. Census Bureau

WashingtonExaminer: Dozens of government employees at the U.S. Census Bureau have been billing taxpayers for time they never actually worked, wasting more than $1 million.

The 40 officials were supposed to be performing background checks on the census personnel who walk door-to-door throughout the country to collect information about Americans. Instead, they “engaged in pervasive misconduct over several years,” according to an investigation by the Commerce Department’s inspector general.

The watchdog found at least one employee in the Census Bureau’s employment office who “used his official position as a personal hiring vehicle for friends and their families.”

That employee, who was not identified, “was involved in a sexual relationship” with a contractor he personally interviewed, hired and supervised.

He also launched a year-long campaign to get a job at the Census Bureau for his friend’s son, an effort that was apparently unsuccessful.

The inspector general found that dozens of employees claimed to have worked at least 19,162 hours during which they actually did not work at all between 2010-14. The “time and attendance abuse” drained nearly $1.1 million.

But after a whistleblower alerted the agency watchdog to the billing scheme, census officials attempted to “intimidate” anyone who was cooperating with the inspector general investigation.

Another unnamed employee repeatedly called the whistleblower a “coward” and a “chickens—,” among other names.

“At an office social event held for a [census employment office] employee, this employee held a knife in his hand to cut the cake and, while making a stabbing motion with his arm, said something to the effect of, ‘This is for who went to the OIG!'” the inspector general said.

Other employees of the office lied to investigators from the watchdog’s office, violating federal laws that bar officials from making false statements to inspectors general.

Beyond the widespread misconduct, the watchdog found “disturbing” evidence that many staff members were not performing adequate background checks on the prospective employees and contractors of the Census Bureau. For example, the inspector general discovered the staff had shared among themselves their boss’ password, allowing them to sign off on their own work rather than have it verified by management.

John Thompson, director of the Census Bureau, said in a statement the employees implicated in the watchdog report “are being placed immediately on administrative leave pending further action.”

“The employee misconduct detailed in the recent Department of Commerce Inspector GeneraI’s report is inexcusable and will not be tolerated,” Thompson said. “Any employees who allegedly falsified timesheets and betrayed the trust of the American public will be held personally accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including possible termination.”

 

A Clock or a Planted Operation?

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So, has the ‘BLM’ Black Lives Matter operation been cast aside for yet another scheme? Or, is this kind of odd event going to be on top of the BLM and there are more to come?

If this is a clock, where is the time and how come the teacher did not recognize it as a clock?

The Real Story of #IStandWithAhmed

Screenshot

by Ben Shapiro18 Sep 20151,408

The hubbub surrounding Irving, Texas 14-year-old MacArthur High School student Ahmed Mohammed – the kid who brought a homemade clock-in-a-case that looked like a fake bomb to school – continues apace, with the President of the United States inviting him to the White House, and 2016 Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tweeting out encouragement.

There’s only one problem: the whole story smells. It stinks of leftist exploitation.

Here’s what we know. On Monday, Mohammed brought a homemade clock to school. For those who don’t know the ins-and-outs of electronics, the device looked like a possible incendiary device. Ahmed told the media that he made the clock last weekend and brought it to school to show his engineering teacher. He explained to local news, “It was the first time I brought an invention to school to show a teacher.”

He didn’t explain that to police, however, according to the authorities. And he didn’t just show the device to his engineering teacher. In fact, the engineering teacher told him not to carry the device around after Mohammed showed him, according to The New York Times:

He said he took it to school on Monday to show an engineering teacher, who said it was nice but then told him he should not show the invention to other teachers. Later, Ahmed’s clock beeped during an English class, and after he revealed the device to the teacher, school officials notified the police, and Ahmed was interrogated by officers. “She thought it was a threat to her,” Ahmed told reporters Wednesday. “So it was really sad that she took a wrong impression of it.”

Why was the device in English class in the first place, especially after the engineering teacher told him not to show it around? When confronted by police and his English teacher, why didn’t Mohammed just tell them to talk to the engineering teacher? When police asked Ahmed what the device was and why he brought it to school, according to WFAA:

Officers said Ahmed was being “passive aggressive” in his answers to their questions, and didn’t have a “reasonable answer” as to what he was doing with the case. Investigators said the student told them that it was just a clock that he was messing around with. “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only say it was a clock. He didn’t offer any explanation as to what it was for, why he created this device, why he brought it to school,” said James McLellan, Irving Police.

Here’s the statute Ahmed Mohammed authorities originally suspected Mohammed of violating (Texas Penal Code Section 46.08):

(a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly manufactures, sells, purchases, transports, or possesses a hoax bomb with intent to use the hoax bomb to:

(1) make another believe that the hoax bomb is an explosive or incendiary device; or

(2) cause alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies.

(b) An offense under this section is a Class A misdemeanor.

Nobody said Mohammed built an actual bomb. They suspected that he had wanted to frighten or alarm officials with a hoax-bomb. When they found out he didn’t intend to do that, they released him.

Given the limited evidence available, this is not far-fetched. Again, where was the engineering teacher to vouch for Mohammed’s story? Why didn’t Mohammed simply explain himself? The police said that initially, it was “not immediately evident” that the clock-in-a-case was a class experiment – perfectly plausible, given that Mohammed built the clock-in-a-case voluntarily, without assignment, and in conjunction with no science fair.

Chief Larry Boyd said simply and correctly, “You can’t take things like that to school” without explanation or assignment in today’s world without it receiving scrutiny.

And according to the cops, Ahmed was significantly more cooperative with friendly media than with the police who came to ask some simple questions.

That’s probably not a coincidence. Ahmed’s father, as Pamela Geller points out, is an anti-Islamophobia media gadfly. He routinely returns to Sudan to run for president; he has debated anti-Koran Florida pastor Terry Jones, partially in order to bring his children to Disneyworld. In 2011, the Washington Post wrote of him:

Elhassan, a native of the Sudan who is now an American citizen, likes to call himself a sheik. He wears a cleric’s flowing white robes and claims hundreds of followers throughout Egypt, Sudan and in the United States. But he is unknown as a scholar or holy man in the state he has called home for two decades. Religious leaders in Texas say they have never heard of Elhassan, including the imam at the mosque where he worships.

It’s no surprise that Ahmed Mohammed’s dad ran to the cameras at the first opportunity. It’s also no surprise that the terror-connected Council on American-Islamic Relations arrived to push the Islamophobia narrative immediately.

But there’s a long history of detaining science students for experiments administrators don’t understand. Homer Hickam, the subject of the movie October Sky, found himself in handcuffs during the Cold War for starting a forest fire with a rocket he built. And since September 11, such incidents have become more common. As someone who went to a Jewish high school based in Los Angeles and located next to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, police and security regularly evacuated our high school due to bomb threats. If one of the students had brought a device to school in this fashion, the student would have been detained and questioned – again, in an all-Jewish school.

And as Ian Tuttle of National Review has pointed out, America has become extra-paranoid of late: students have been suspended for gun-shaped Pop Tarts, cap guns, finger guns, and saying the word gun, among other grave offenses. And we don’t even need weapons to suspend students anymore: wearing an American flag at the wrong time or donning a Confederate flag t-shirt will do it.

So why, after the detention and release, did this story become a national one? Why did Obama jump on this story? Why did Hillary jump on this story? Where were they for then-16-year-old Kiera Wilmot of Florida to the White House after she was arrested and suspended in 2013 for bringing an experiment with toilet cleaner and aluminum foil to school? She was black but not Muslim, so it didn’t serve the narrative. They were MIA.

For years, the Obama administration has pushed the notion that American Muslims are in danger of Islamophobic backlash. But as of 2012, 62.4 percent of all anti-religious hate crimes targeted Jews; 11.6 percent targeted Muslims; as of 2013, anti-Jewish hate crimes represented 60.3 percent of all hate crimes, as opposed to just 13.7 percent for Muslims. That’s a major decline in anti-Islamic hate crimes since 2001, when 55.7 percent of hate crimes were anti-Jewish, and anti-Muslim hate crimes constituted 27.2 percent of all hate crimes.

So where, exactly, are all the invitations to Jewish students targeted in hate crime incidents?

They don’t exist, because they don’t help President Obama castigate America as xenophobic and backwards – and just as importantly, castigate Texans as particularly likely to don white hoods and go hunt down some Sufis.

The narrative reigns supreme. Ahmed Mohammed brought a clock-in-a-case that looked like a hoax bomb to the uninformed to school; his engineering teacher told him not to show it around; he showed it around; the police showed up, and he was allegedly uncooperative; they decided he was innocent and released him.

That’s not a national scandal. That’s local cops and teachers and administrators doing their jobs, decently but cautiously. Yet that won’t be what you hear. You’ll just hear that America hates Muslims, even as Americans self-righteously tweet out #IStandWithAhmed without hearing the facts.

The Word Police in Media Deny Judges Op-Eds

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Right on the Department of Homeland Security website, it appears that the term ‘illegal alien’ is acceptable. Curiously, the Department of Justice uses ‘unlawful aliens’.

So, rather than solve the bigger issue, the matter gets bogged down in political correctness and terminology objections?

Ex-judges bolt legal journal over ban on term ‘illegal alien’

FNC: A pair of veteran immigration judges have left a widely read legal journal over its ban on the term “illegal alien,” calling the decision a case of the “political correctness word police” taking control of the immigration debate.

Retired U.S. Immigration Court judges Mahlon “Mick” Hanson and Elizabeth Hacker, who wrote opinion articles for Law360’s “expert analysis” section since the beginning of this year, say they used the term “illegal alien” without issue. But when they submitted an article in July on sanctuary cities, the editors of the publication declined to publish it unless certain changes were made, including the removal of the term illegal alien.

“Language must conform to Law360 style, avoiding what is perceived to be derogatory reference to ‘illegal aliens,'” Christian Lewis, assistant managing editor of Law360, wrote in a July 30 email to Dale Wilcox of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, who was submitting the piece on behalf of the judges because they are IRLI board members.

“The only legally correct term is ‘illegal alien.'”

– Retired US Immigration Judge Mahlon Hanson

“I understand based on the authors’ June 10 article that they believe this is a semantic argument, however our publication does follow the rule that ‘illegal’ applies to actions, not individuals,” Lewis wrote.

Law360 — a subscription, legal news source which boasts a readership of 400,000 and is operated by the Portfolio Media company, a subsidiary of LexisNexis — first suggested the judges change the language to “undocumented alien” and then “unauthorized alien.” In addition, Lewis questioned the sources used by the seasoned immigration jurists in writing their piece, which roundly criticized sanctuary cities following the July 1 murder of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle. Francisco Sanchez, an illegal alien, is accused of killing Steinle, who was shot while walking with her father in San Francisco. Sanctuary cities are communities that have an official policy of not cooperating with federal authorities in the detention of illegal immigrants or handing them over for deportation.

The judges said they were “shocked” by the editorial board’s insistence the term not be used — noting the Immigration & Nationality Act and its various amendments use “illegal alien,” as do judges presiding over immigration law cases nationwide. A LexisNexis search of the term’s use in case law generates thousands of examples.

Hanson and Hacker said they trimmed their article at the editors’ request and clarified their sources, but refused to resubmit the piece with language they deemed legally incorrect.

“I was, quite frankly, very surprised,” Hacker told FoxNews.com. “We had submitted several other articles to them on immigration-related issues and had used that term, which we consider to be the legally correct term.”

“I don’t want to use inappropriate language, which in my opinion is designed to deceive people as to the state of affairs in the immigration area,” Hacker said.

“The only legally correct term is ‘illegal alien,'” added Hanson.

In an email to FoxNews.com, Law360 explained that it is simply complying with The Associated Press guidelines for journalists. In 2013, the AP dropped the use of the word “illegal” to describe a person who enters or resides in a country in violation of civil or criminal law.

“Like many other news organizations, Law360 follows Associated Press style on the use of the term “illegal immigrant,” Cat Fredenburgh, editor-in-chief of Law360, said in the email. “Per AP, Law360 uses the term ‘illegal’ to refer only to actions, not people. Law360 requires all third-party contributors to comply with our style guidelines.

“Hon. Elizabeth Hacker and Hon. Mahlon Hanson submitted an article for publication with Law360 but withdrew the article upon learning of Law360’s policy against the use of the term ‘illegal’ to refer to people,” Fredenburgh said. “We did not ban the judges from writing for Law360. In fact, we suggested ways the article could still be published while complying with our style. The judges’ decision to withdraw the article from consideration with Law360 was theirs alone.”

The editorial board’s style change — and the reason for it — did nothing to persuade the judges to resubmit their piece.

“I think it’s basically a propaganda tool when The Associated Press is starting to tell reporters what term to use,” Hanson said.

“It’s really disappointing because they advertise themselves as a trusted legal resource,” he said of the law publication. “You know how definitions are important in court cases in using the precise legal terminology…I was surprised that they pushed it to that extent.”

In an Op-Ed published Thursday for FoxNews.com, Hacker and Hanson blamed the Obama administration and other factors for changing the terms of the illegal immigration debate to push an agenda.

“This administration, a compliant media and the ‘political correctness’ word police have taken control of the immigration debate with an agenda of deception, doublespeak and censorship.”

Of the term “undocumented immigrant,” Hacker and Hanson said it is “factually incorrect because many of the aliens illegally present in this country have documents.”

“These documents may range from those unlawfully obtained, like Social Security cards or Social Security numbers, fraudulent drivers licenses, or other documents legally obtained such as ‘cedulas’ or driver’s licenses,” they said. “Also, the term ‘immigrant’ only applies to a person who has either legally entered the United States as a lawful permanent resident or has been adjusted to that status while in the United States.”