Assimilate, Legal, Loyal, Self-Sustaining

Posted on October 8, 2015October 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Illegal, asylum, refugees, entitlements, protected class, surrendered

Record 63.2 million non-English speaking residents, surge in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish

More than one in five U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home, a record, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In an analysis of the recent Census American Community Survey, a huge surge was recorded in those who speak Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and Urdu, Pakistan’s national language.

The report from the Center for Immigration Studies documented the growth of immigrants in the United States and provided evidence of concerns new immigrants are slow to assimilate into American culture, namely by speaking English at home.

According to the Center’s analysis released to Secrets Tuesday morning, in 2014, a record 63.2 million U.S. residents — native-born, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants — spoke a language other than English at home. That represents a surge of 16.2 million since 2000 and 1.4 million just since 2013.

Overall, wrote the Center’s Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, the number of non-English speakers has doubled since 1990.

The top findings in the report titled “One in Five U.S. Residents Speaks Foreign Language at Home:”

Since 1990 the number of foreign language speakers has roughly doubled; the number has almost tripled since 1980.
In 2014, a record 63.2 million U.S. residents (native-born, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants) spoke a language other than English at home. That number is up 16.2 million since 2000, up 3.6 million since 2010, and up 1.4 million just since 2013.
Taking a longer view, since 1990 the number of foreign language speakers has roughly doubled.
As a share of the population, 21 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home.
The largest percentage increases from 2010 to 2014 were among speakers of Arabic (up 29 percent), Urdu (up 23 percent), Hindi (up 19 percent), Chinese and Hmong (both up 12 percent), and Gujarati and Persian (both up 9 percent). Urdu is spoken in Pakistan; Hindi and Guajarati are languages of India; Hmong is spoken in Laos; Persian is spoken in Iran.
The largest numerical increases from 2010 to 2014 were among speakers of Spanish (up 2.3 million), Chinese (up 331,000), Arabic (up 252,000), Tagalog (up 115,000), Hindi (up 114,000), and Urdu (up 89,000). Tagalog is spoken in the Philippines.
Languages with more than a million speakers in 2014 were Spanish (39. 3 million), Chinese (3.1 million), Tagalog (1.7 million), Vietnamese (1.5 million), French (1.2 million), and Korean and Arabic (1.1 million each).
Of school-age children (five to 17), 22 percent speak a foreign language at home.
Many of those who speak a foreign language at home are not immigrants. Of the more than 63 million foreign language speakers, 44 percent (27.7 million) were actually born in the United States.
Of those who speak a foreign language at home, 25.6 million (41 percent) told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well.

One last item, the terror component:

Reuters: FBI counterterrorism investigators followed “dozens and dozens” of potential militants around the United States full time during the summer and “disrupted” many of them, FBI Director James Comey told a congressional committee on Thursday.

Comey, who testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs along with Nick Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said U.S. investigators are aware of dozens of U.S.-based Islamic militant suspects who now are using encrypted communications.

Comey said investigators had followed “dozens and dozens of people around the United States 24/7” during the summer and had “disrupted” them.

Comey told the committee that Islamic State recruits from the United States are incrementally younger with more “girls –women under 18” – seeking to join the militant group.

Rasmussen testified that Islamic State has overtaken al Qaeda as leader of the global violent extremist movement and has access to a large pool of potential recruits in Western countries.

He said counterterrorism experts still regard al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate AQAP as big threat due to its interest in attacking the United States and airplanes.

Obama Does Gun Control, Putin Does Hockey, No Phone Calls

Posted on October 8, 2015October 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Scary with all this going on…no one is talking to each other especially when Defense Secretary Ash Carter says we will not cooperate or coordinate with Russia.

Carter: “Now, the Russians originally said they were going in to fight ISIL and al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations. However, within days of deploying their forces, the Russians began striking targets that are not any of these groups. I have said repeatedly over the last week that we, the United States, believed this is a fundamental strategic mistake and that it will inflame and prolong the Syrian civil war. We have not and will not agree to cooperate with Russia so long as they continue to pursue this misguided strategy. We’ve seen increasingly unprofessional behavior from Russian forces. They violated Turkish airspace, which as all of us here made clear earlier this week, and strongly affirmed today here in Brussels, is NATO airspace.” The full remarks by Carter while in Belgium are here.

Confluence or Conflating

Kearsarge ARG Deploys for Europe, Middle East Operations

The Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group and 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit departed Oct. 6 from the East Coast for a deployment to the Middle East.

The more than 4,000 sailors and Marines will support theater security cooperation and maritime security operations and provide an added crisis response capability to U.S. 5th and 6th Fleet areas of operations.

The ARG/MEU includes amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD-3), amphibious transport dock ship USS Arlington (LPD-24), amphibious dock landing ship USS Oak Hill (LSD-51),

Kearsarge and the 26th MEU last deployed from March to November 2013, during a time of great unrest in the region. Kearsarge and USS San Antonio (LPD-17) spent a lot of time in the northern part of the region – operating in the Mediterranean out of Rota, Spain, and in the northern Red Sea – while USS Carter Hall (LSD-50) spent time operating independently near Bahrain and Djibouti.

Upon returning home, Kearsarge spent five months in maintenance at BAE Systems Norfolk Ship Repair before beginning sea trials last summer. Kearsarge served as the flagship in the Bold Alligator 2014 amphibious exercise last fall.

Rocket Launch with Secret Payload

United Launch Alliance aims to launch its second Atlas V rocket in less than a week with a blastoff planned Thursday morning from California’s Central Coast.

The rocket is targeting a liftoff at 5:49 a.m. PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office.

There’s a 70% chance of acceptable weather at Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex-3. The full launch window has not been disclosed.

“We are excited and ready to take on our first Atlas launch of 2015,” said Col. J. Christopher Moss, commander of the 30th Space Wing, in a statement Wednesday. “Our team and mission partners have put a lot of hard work into preparing for this important mission for our nation.”
Amateur spacecraft observers speculate that the rocket is carrying a pair of satellites updating the Naval Ocean Surveillance System, or NOSS.

In addition to the primary mission, the rocket’s Centaur upper stage will deliver a group of 13 experimental and student-developed CubeSats to orbit.

The tiny spacecraft include nine missions sponsored by the NRO and four by NASA. Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Services Program was responsible for securing the ride for the NASA-sponsored payloads known as ElaNA-12.

A successful launch would keep ULA on track to return to Cape Canaveral for an Oct. 30 launch of the Air Force’s next Global Positioning System satellite on an Atlas V. The booster for that mission was delivered to the Cape on Tuesday.
An Atlas V last Friday successfully delivered Mexico’s Morelos-3 communications satellite to orbit, completing ULA’s 100th launch since Boeing and Lockheed Martin formed the joint venture in December 2006.

And Wednesday, in the first launch since an Antares rocket exploded shortly after takeoff on Oct. 29, 2014, a sounding rocket successfully blasted off from NASA’s Wallops Space Facility in Virginia.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” an Iranian official source said when asked about Russia’s intervention in Syria. “The Russians were certain that if they did not move now, the next war they would fight would be inside their borders; this is about Russia’s national security before being about Syria. Therefore, a decision to start this pre-emptive war was taken by the Kremlin.”

For decades, Syria has been one of Russia’s main allies in the Middle East. The collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t change anything in this regard. Moscow continued to support Damascus with whatever necessary to keep the old empire’s last balcony on the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives to speak at a Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights meeting in the Grand Kremlin Palace on Oct. 1, 2015, in Moscow, Russia.

Russia Gets Back in the Game

In 2011, amid the eruption of the revolution in Syria, the Russians started feeling the heat. It was almost obvious to them that the fall of the regime in Damascus would lead to serious changes in Russia’s status in the Middle East; thus this wasn’t an option to even think about, and everything possible should be done to maintain the regime and keep it breathing, should this be using the veto in the UN Security Council, sending arms and ammunitions, or as we are witnessing today, intervening militarily and fighting to keep the status quo. Russia is not the only ally of the Syrian government; Iran also has been supporting President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia and Iran have not previously been allies. They share common interests, common allies and common rivals; however, this doesn’t necessarily mean they act as allies. In Syria, their common interest has been — and still is — keeping their common ally, the regime, alive. Even within the Syrian regime, there are different views among the ranks on how to deal with both countries; there are officials who are seen as “Iranians” and others as “Russians.” This is prompted by fears among one wing that the Islamic Republic’s agenda in Syria involves Islamization of society, while the other wing that prefers the Iranians sees them as very reliable since they were the first to roll their sleeves up in the fight for the regime’s existence. Yet, this is only a matter of preferences, and nothing more.

Russian Dumb Bombs Land in Iran, ooops

Posted on October 8, 2015October 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

TWS: A number of cruise missiles launched from a Russian ship and aimed at targets in Syria have crashed in Iran, two U.S. officials told CNN Thursday. Monitoring by U.S. military and intelligence assets has concluded that at least four missiles crashed as they flew over Iran. One official said there may be casualties, but another official said this is not yet known.

Evidently, Russian ordinance is not quite state the art and Putin’s weapons do not match up with his will. Hard to imagine that will deter him.

***

Russia has very few precision guided missiles valued at $26,000 each, so they aging inventory of dumb bombs dropped manually, valued at $600 each are the ordnance of choice. So, accuracy by Russian pilots is well…lousy.

Why is Russia using ‘dumb bombs’ in Syria?

Russian planes bomb the old-fashioned way, letting the bombs just fall

Experts: Kremlin doesn’t have vast supplies of precision-guided missiles

Risk: An old-fashioned, unguided bomb drifts off course, lands in Turkey

WASHINGTON

Russia has made little use of precision-guided bombs during its young air campaign in Syria, a choice that experts say increases the chances that more civilians will be killed in the strikes and that a stray bomb hitting Turkey could bring other NATO nations into the war.

That danger was illustrated over the weekend when a Russian aircraft crossed into Turkey and a second warplane breached a Turkish-monitored safety zone inside Syria as they conducted bombing runs in northern Syria. Turkey scrambled jets to intercept the intruders, and NATO issue a sharp rebuke over the incidents.

A repeat, however, is highly likely, because unlike the United States military, Russia doesn’t have a vast supply of the precision-guided weapons that have become the hallmark of American air power.

Since the start of the U.S.-led air war in Iraq and Syria more than a year ago, American military leaders repeatedly have boasted that the current U.S.-led air campaign is the most surgical that American forces ever have conducted, thanks to the use of laser-guided missiles, GPS targeting and other high-tech systems. Last week, Army Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, called the airstrikes over Iraq and Syria “the most precise in the history of warfare.”

“The amount of care that we have taken to preserve civilian life, to preserve civilian infrastructure is unprecedented,” he said.

Still, that care has not saved the lives of hundreds of civilians who’ve died in U.S. airstrikes. While the U.S. Central Command, which runs American military operations in the Middle East, has acknowledged responsibility for only two such collateral killings – the deaths of two children in a November 2014 bombing raid in Syria – human rights groups and local activists put the numbers much higher.

Russian bombing is likely to take an even higher toll, experts say, for one simple reason: Russia is bombing the old-fashioned way: flying its planes over the target, releasing the bombs and letting gravity carry them to their ground targets.

“I can’t definitively rule out that they haven’t used any of their advanced guided munitions, but so far there is nothing in the images and video we’ve seen of the actual strikes that indicates the use of those guided munitions yet,” said Sim Tack, a Russian military analyst with Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based group that sells geopolitical intelligence to U.S. and international corporations and government agencies.

Tack and other experts offered a range of theories for why the Russians aren’t using precision-guided missiles in Syria, from their much higher cost (precision-guided weapons cost from $26,000 to $1.1 million each; an unguided bomb as little as $600) and the Kremlin’s relative inexperience in employing them, to looser rules of engagement that allow Russian pilots to identify their targets with relative impunity from discipline over civilian deaths.

“There are at least some pilots in the Russian air force who have some capability of using (precision-guided weapons),” Tack said. “If the Russians wanted to make it a priority right now, they could do so. The fact that they are not probably means they’re fine with doing things as they are.”

But beyond the increased threat to civilians, Russia’s bombing strategy carries a still greater risk: Sparking a wider war by hitting Turkey, even if only incidentally.

Satellite imagery and reports from Syrians in the area indicate that some Russian bombs have landed as close as 200 yards from the Turkish border.

10,684 The number of Islamic State sites that U.S. Central Command says were hit by American bombs during the first year of Operation Inherent Resolve, including buildings, fighting positions, staging areas, Humvees, oil infrastructure, tanks and other targets.

“The lighter a bomb is, the more surface area it has, the higher you drop it from and the stronger the wind, the farther it can drift off course,” Tack said. “I would say that 200 meters is definitely dangerously close to the border, if that’s where they are conducting their bombings.”

Dmitri Gorenburg, a researcher at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studies and an analyst for the CNA think tank in Arlington, Va., said successive Russian governments showed little regard for civilian life during their short-lived 2008 war in the former Soviet republic of Georgia or earlier during two wars totaling more than 10 years in the vast country’s Muslim-dominated Chechnya region.

“In Chechnya, there was wholesale destruction of (the regional capital) Grozny, not just from aircraft but with artillery as well,” Gorenburg told McClatchy. “And if you look at (the Russian incursion in) Ukraine recently, there haven’t been too many qualms about using artillery on population centers. So Russia certainly has demonstrated less care about harming civilians.”

Gorenburg said that Russia may be more hesitant to use precision bombs simply because it possesses fewer of them than do the United States and its more technologically advanced allies.

“They don’t want to use up all their (precision-guided weapons) in Syria, so they use the dumb bombs instead,” Gorenburg told McClatchy. “From their point of view, given the scale of destruction that’s already taken place in Syria, it may not matter as much if some stray building gets hit.”

Gorenburg said that Moscow may be starting its air campaign by using bombs it had previously given or sold to the Syrian government, a longtime Russia ally.

“Because Syria uses the same (Russian-made) planes, they can use the bombs they’ve provided Syria the last few years,” he said. “They weren’t giving the Syrians anything too fancy or expensive.”

Susan Rice Inspires Obama to be Anti-Israel

Posted on October 8, 2015October 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Proof in this video, begin at the 11:00 mark for the nuggets.

WaPo: Jeffrey Goldberg has quoted an anonymous Obama Administration official as calling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a “chickenshit” because Bibi refuses to make bold moves for peace that might endanger his electoral prospects. Putting aside the incorrect use of the word chickenshit (which is not synonymous with “a chicken”), and the fact that it’s foolish to base a diplomatic strategy on assuming politicians won’t act like politicians, I think the underlying dynamic here reflects not just the general antipathy the Obama and Netanyahu administrations have for each other, but the continuing fallout from the Obama Administration’s initial gross misreading of the Israeli political scene.

Very succinctly, the Obama Administration came in to office thinking it could either force Netanyahu to make concessions, or force his government to fall. Both the Shamir and the first Netanyahu governments made concessions and ultimately got tossed out by the voters after tensions rose with the U.S., so this was not a completely unreasonable assumption.

However, Obama and his advisors missed several contrary factors. The Israeli public never liked Obama, never trusted him due to his well-known associations with various anti-Israel leftists such as Rashid Khalidi.

Ex-Adviser to Obama Says Susan Rice Accused Israeli Leader of Racism

NYT: WASHINGTON — Dennis B. Ross, the former Middle East adviser to President Obama, faults Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, for exacerbating tensions with Israel during the talks that led up to the recent nuclear accord with Iran and quotes her accusing Israel’s prime minister of racism.

In a new book on Israeli-American relations, Mr. Ross — who has worked on Middle East diplomacy for presidents of both parties — concludes that Ms. Rice’s “combative mind-set” worsened an already troubled relationship with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who feared that negotiations would leave Iran a threshold nuclear state.

Written Sword by Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings

Posted on October 8, 2015October 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Full letter is found here.

The Blaze: Trey Gowdy Calls Out Ranking Dem on Benghazi Committee in Scathing 13-Page Letter: ‘This Information Could Have Only From Democrat Members’

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, sent a scathing 13-page letter to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) on Wednesday, urging him to “rise above the political pressure” being put on him by Democrats and keep the “promises” made to the families of the American heroes who died in Libya.

Gowdy scolded Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, for putting on a “public posture” that is “quite the opposite” from the one he has taken during private discussions.

“Not once in any of these conversations have you ever questioned the motivations of the Committee’s work or questioned our mission to uncover the facts surrounding the Benghazi terrorist attacks,” Gowdy wrote. “Your Democrat colleagues and you have contributed nothing substantively to the Committee’s investigation over the past seventeen months—you have not requested a single new witness interview nor have you made one single document request to any Executive Branch Agency.”

The fiery South Carolina congressman then accused Cummings and Democrats of “selectively” leaking information about the Benghazi Committee’s probe “to promote your own false narrative.”

Cummings and other Democrats wrote their own letter on Monday accusing the Republicans of using Benghazi as a political weapon and revealed they plan to release the transcript of an interview with Cheryl Mills to “correct the public record.”

“This is glaringly obvious—no testimony has been disclosed from people interviewed who were on the ground or from national security professionals,” he added .”Instead, the only leaks have been regarding Democrat political figures, and the initial stories have all selectively disclosed testimony to fit with Democrat political narratives.”

He provided a specific instance where information appeared to be intentionally leaked:

Gowdy concluded his letter by vowing to finish the Benghazi Committee’s investigation.

“While it is unfortunate that for over seven months the State Department withheld nearly 1,900 pages of Secretary Clinton’s emails responsive to this Committee’s request, our work must go on,” he wrote. “Simply because you have chosen to play politics with this Committee and the State Department has chosen to play politics by shielding its former Secretary at the expense of the truth does not mean that this Committee was founded on politics, is based on politics, or will veer off course due to the political actions and allegations of others.”

Read the last things he had to say before he signed his name:

The full letter can be found here.