Theodore's World

The White House wants a $1.4 billion stimulus/national security package…for Mexico
State Gov.
CFR
The plan is called “The Merida Initiative.” The White House has had this plan in the works for nearly a year with little congressional input on either side of the border.
The State Dept is leading the way.
Shannon O’Neil, CFR’s Mexico expert, says that although many members of Congress are upset at not being consulted on the details of a new $1.4 billion multiyear initiative to bolster Mexico’s crackdown on drug and criminal rings, she believes that it will get congressional approval. “There is political will on both sides to help Mexico out,” she says.
The State Dept. disclosed the first phase of the Merida Initiative last October, involving some $550 million in aid for inspection scanners, helicopters, surveillance tools, and case management software:
This partnership would support coordinated strategies to:

*Produce a safer and more secure hemisphere where criminal organizations no longer threaten governments and regional security; and
*Prevent the entry and spread of illicit drugs and transnational threats throughout the region and to the United States.

To achieve these goals, President Bush has requested $550 million as part of a multi-year program to provide:

*Non-intrusive inspection equipment, ion scanners, canine units for Mexican customs, for the new federal police and for the military to interdict trafficked drugs, arms, cash and persons.
*Technologies to improve and secure communications systems to support collecting information as well as ensuring that vital information is accessible for criminal law enforcement.
*Technical advice and training to strengthen the institutions of justice – vetting for the new police force, case management software to track investigations through the system to trial, new offices of citizen complaints and professional responsibility, and establishing witness protection programs.
*Helicopters and surveillance aircraft to support interdiction activities and rapid operational response of law enforcement agencies in Mexico.
*Initial funding for security cooperation with Central America that responds directly to Central American leaders’ concerns over gangs, drugs, and arms articulated during July SICA meetings and the SICA Security Strategy.
*Includes equipment and assets to support counterpart security agencies inspecting and interdicting drugs, trafficked goods, people and other contraband as well as equipment, training and community action programs in Central American countries to implement anti-gang measures and expand the reach of these measures in the region.

Now where did this initiative come from?
It actually came from the Mexican side. Calderon proposed to Bush to do some sort of joint project back in March when they met together in Merida, so hence it becomes the Merida Initiative. In the first year, Bush is proposing $500 million of aid to Mexico and over the next three years $1.4 billion worth of aid to help Calderon build up his technological equipment and police and military forces to combat the drug cartels.
Is there a bill now before Congress?
Sure. It is a supplementary funding bill mainly for Iraq, in which the Merida Initiative is included. It is $500 million as a part of a larger $50 billion package. So it’s tied in some ways to the state of the Iraq funding as well, which is of course an issue in its own right.
Has the initiative gone to any committee for consideration?
This is just added on. So the people in the House and Senate foreign relations committees are discussing this but the administration hasn’t sent someone yet to really discuss the nitty-gritty of this bill to either of the subcommittees yet. So they haven’t really yet started hatching up the issues yet. Congress has complained that its members were left out of the negotiation process.
Usually when there is a major initiative, people from the State Department or the Defense Department go to Capitol Hill and brief the staff people on what’s up. Why was this done so secretively?
It’s hard to know. In fact the House subcommittee on the western hemisphere had asked the State Department to come right after it was really released. The department said, “Not yet. We’re going to come in a couple of weeks with more information.” So it’s a little unclear why they have been so secretive. But perhaps it’s because they were really hammering out these negotiations with the Mexican government and trying to deal with the sensitivities of Mexico.

Also, according to one expert, “Mexico is very protective of its sovereignty and very worried about any incursion of U.S. security forces or private contractors—like Blackwater—coming in to train Mexicans.”
And what does Mexico do for the United States?
Mexico refuses to extradite criminal suspects who’ve fled from the U.S. down to Mexico unless our prosecutors drop death penalty charges against them.

BUT this is not all of it, yes there is more, while seeing all of this at Michelle Malkins blog I did a search online and also found this – Wild Thing
Mexican president to visit US amid immigration debate
AFP

Mexican president Felipe Calderon was to arrive in the United States Sunday for a working visit amid a fiery US election-year debate over illegal immigrants from Latin America……
Calderon will not be meeting with his US counterpart George W. Bush, despite it being his first visit since he became president in December 2006.
Nor will he meet with any of the leading candidates for the US presidency, whose campaign has highlighted the debate over the US handling of millions of illegal immigrants, including an estimated five million Mexicans, and efforts to build a wall along much of the two neighbors’ 3,000 kilometer (1,600 mile) border.
Instead, Calderon will travel to New York, Boston, Chicago, Sacramento and Los Angeles to meet with expatriate Mexican community leaders and academic and financial sector figures.
Calderon told the New York Times in an interview Thursday that the heightened furor over illegal immigrants was threatening the close relationship between Mexico and the United States.
“I’m very worried because this has generated an atmosphere full of prejudice, an anti-immigrant atmosphere with certain themes that are also anti-Mexican, that benefits no one,” he told the Times.
“It seems to me the worst thing the two countries could do is make our people think our enemy is our neighbor.”
He was also critical of the US approach to Latin America in general.
“What is clear to me is that in Latin America, and in the world, for some reason the United States has been losing friends, and it seems to me it should do everything possible to reach out to the few friends it has left.”
In New York their meetings will include financier David Rockefeller, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

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Wild Thing’s comment……..
And party hacks are still wondering why ‘stupid’ conservative voters aren’t jumping on the party bandwagon. Unbelievable that the Democrats are the one questioning this. I realize the Democrats will always be critical of anything GWB is doing. The line drawn between the good guys and the bad guys has molded into one. With just a few straglers remaining that LOVE our country and want a soverign nation and want to secure our boders especially since we are at WAR. Not that would be someting wouldn’t it. To actually HELP our troops fight this war and secure our borders and stop kissing up to the illegal lovers in our government.
Mexico is NOT our friend, nor is it anywhere near being an ally, and worse yet our leaders are the enemy of our country most of them.
OH and you will love this too, look at this that I found, from the Laraza .com site…….

“the Calderón government hoped that Bush would offer at least three times the $1.4 billion finally agreed upon.”

We can’t—or won’t—control our southwestern border. The Mexicans are actively thwarting our attempts to do so.
And our president gives them over a billion dollars. And we have a man in our own party that has had 3 Amnesty plans and he is running for President. And we are told he is a (choke cough) conservative!
Absolutely incredible! I am so sick of GW not listening!!! And McCain is not going to listen either. He makes me ill when he gets that smug look on his face and says ” I will build YOUR fence“. Why NOT his fence too this is HIS country for pet’e sake.
Clinton sold us out to the Chinese – a nation arming themselves to destroy us from the outside. El presidente Shrub has sold us out for illegal immigrants to destroy us from the inside. And we are told by Bush that he is a conservative and so is John McCain as he back him for President.

….Thank you Mark for telling me about this.

* Michelle Malkin

The flag of the Castro-led Cuba regime, with Che Guevara’s face superimposed on the side. A Fox report from Houston captured this image as it showed Obama supporters celebrating his momentum after Super Tuesday.

This clip from myfoxhouston.com shows a Barack Obama office in Houston with a flag over the desk…not the American flag, but the Cuban flag. And the flag is adorned by a picture of infamous terrorist, tyrant, and opponent of democracy, Che Guevara.
Che Guevara was a violent communist anti-American, something nobody would dispute.

Airmen having fun

Lillian Garcia sings Anthem in Iraq with troops

Meet Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton’s new campaign manager
daily news washington bureau
WASHINGTON
Among Billaryland’s inner circle, Maggie Williams is renowned as the ultimate Hillary loyalist, fierce and unwavering in her devotion for nearly 25 years.
As the First Lady’s chief of staff, her office was in the West Wing, right next to Hillary’s.
Her title gave away the extent of her clout: assistant to the President as well as Hillary’s gatekeeper and chief enforcer.
Even detractors agree with her admirers that Williams would go to the mat for Hillary.
A Kansas City native, Williams, 53, was a central player in the Clinton damage-control machine during the White House years.
In 1995, a uniformed Secret Service officer swore under oath he saw her leave White House lawyer and Hillary confidant Vince Foster’s office carrying documents after Foster committed suicide. Williams denied it.
She ran up more than $100,000 in legal bills defending Hillary in various investigations.
A former aide to Reps. Morris Udall of Arizona and Robert Torricelli (later senator) of New Jersey, Williams’ ties to Hillary date to when they both were at the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1980s.
After the Clintons left the White House, Williams was named president of Fenton Communications, a leading public relations and consulting firm.
When Bill and Hillary Clinton made remarks before the South Carolina primary that offended African-Americans, the campaign put her on the airwaves to try to quell the uproar.
“She’s never run a political campaign, but she has run a staff and isn’t afraid to crack heads,” a Democratic booster said.
And also this…………
She was knee-deep in the Johnny Chung scandal.
She was knee-deep in the Johnny Chung scandal.
Flashback: March 17, 1997, Time mag:

Sometimes,” President Bill Clinton mused on Friday afternoon, “there is a difference between what is legal and what ought to be done.” And with that he offered a guided tour of Washington’s favorite hideaway–the fertile, foggy valley that lies somewhere between what is wrong and what is illegal. You don’t have to be a lawyer to get in, but it helps to think like one.
Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Maggie Williams, was spending the day there in March 1995, when California businessman Johnny Chung walked into her White House office one morning and handed her a check for $50,000. It was just “a rather unusual circumstance,” Clinton explained last week. She didn’t actually ask Chung for the money as the price of admission to sit in on the President’s radio address two days later. She wasn’t “receiving” contributions on federal property; she was just passing them along. And she certainly didn’t “solicit” them, which federal law forbids.
Or does it? Or did she? Chung’s lawyer, Brian Sun, told TIME that Chung had approached Williams’ aide Evan Ryan the day before, hoping to arrange a cozy lunch in the White House mess for some Chinese businessmen and a later meeting with the First Lady. Somehow the subject turned to Democratic Party needs. Ryan remarked that the President’s party had to cover the costs of political events held by the First Lady at the White House, although Ryan “does not recall” that conversation. So Chung came back the next day and handed Williams that “unsolicited” $50,000 check for the Democratic National Committee. According to Sun, Chung did so with the understanding that it would help him gain access for his guests, who indeed dined in the mess and had their pictures taken with Hillary the next day.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
Hillary must think she’s in real trouble to bring in a fixer like Maggie.
Maggie was also allegedly the “bag lady” for unlawful campaign contributions delivered to the White House, including Chinese funny-money in clear violation of the FEC.
Her involvement in Vince Foster’s unfortunate mishap in a remote DC park is also malodorous. She was apparently involved in sanitizing Vince’s office of all White Water evidence, and had at least a minor role in the mysterious “suicide” note caper.
When asked at the White Water hearings why she took them home, her reply was she had to do laundry in the middle of the day. This is also the women who lived in France after the White Water hearings until the dust settled.

McCain’s radical Hispanic outreach director

Wild Thing’s comment……..
This is the man McCain chose for his “Hispanic Outreach Director.” In the past week McCain was asked about this choice, and he said he chose Hernandez because he agrees with his positions. If so, McCain is supporting invasion and reconquista.
Iin our Constitution, Article 4 Section 4, where it says the federal government MUST protect the states from invasion, and I can only conclude one thing, John McCain has no respect for our country or our Constitution.
Something I noticed in this video. I had to listen to it twice to make sure. I heard Juan Hernandez several times say ” my friend”. Now who does that remind me of? McCain and his constant saying that into nausium.

Whatever America will have accomplished by its mission in Iraq, one thing is already clear here at home. Between the Vietnam and Iraq wars, a large and simplistic body of “ pacifist” opinion had gathered in America, and the Iraq war turned it loose. You might ask where it was during the Bosnian campaign, which brought us closer to large-scale warfare than at any other time since Vietnam. Simple. That mission was prosecuted by a liberal Democrat, which means that any misadventure will be judged by liberals in The Court of No Opinion.
But more to the point, with Clinton, the Democrats had no backbone, for a battle among themselves with the radical anti-war forces flourishing within the party. They also had the purifying idealism of fighting oppression and genocide to alibi the killing in Bosnia. This same fluctuating idealism was lavished briefly on the Afghans, but almost entirely withheld from Iraqis. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you’re insane.
When Bush decided to react to the continuous, low-grade war waged upon us for thirty years by Islamists, he spend a befuddled year seeking permission to fight back. This allowed time for the Western anti-war armies to assemble and plan their opposition to it.. When our troops finally left the gate, we found that we were at war with at least two enemies – Islamists here and abroad – and the non-violent legions of The West, to whom war is unthinkable, especially if waged by Republicans on behalf of Western civilization.
Men of my age and background faced these folks in the 1960’s. I knew people then who called themselves “ pacifists”, people who were smugly non-violent because they never had to fight for anything. They didn’t know how to fight. They attributed their comfort and good luck to good character and superior ideas, and this fallacy turned upon their conceit that violence is east and non-violence is difficult. The opposite is actually true. Fighting might be sometimes exciting, but it’s never easy. Only the idealist young, the foolish or the deranged go looking for it, while the prudent and old are simply prepared.
But the people I’m talking about weren’t actually pacifists, they were passive. I’d trust a principled pacifist more then someone who is vaguely anti-war and blithely non-violent. Pacifism as a way of life is deeply complicated, and it’s a respectable approach to personal revelation and conduct. It’s not easy to be a principled pacifist. It’s dangerous too (you can be a medic or Corpsmant in the military, or you can practice warfare of the non-violent kind- Satyagraha, or firmness in the truth, generally thought of as passive resistance. This was Ghandi’s kind of warfare against British rule. It expressed another absolutely essential element of doctrinaire pacifism – a coherent philosophy of good and evil. Ghandi knew that, in all human disputes, it matters which side wins. He fought with non –violent weapons at his philosophical disposal, but he fought, nevertheless. He didn’t refuse, he didn’t equivocate, he didn’t temporize. He fought and he knew right from wrong.
In contrast, the pacifism of 1960’s liberalism, which survives today, usually includes the perfidious rule that America is a preternatural aggressor, and always includes the irrational belief that the problem of war can be resolved by high-minded declarations of righteousness. UN Resolutions. Violence never solved anything. What if they gave a war and nobody came? Stop the war. And that peal in this bed of stones, both sides are at fault.
The claim that both sides are at fault upholds the fantasy that Reason would prevent the organized violence of war; that only the mad or disordered can consider war as a solution to anything. But in the world of solid objects, there is a lot of madness, evil and brutality. It’s simply true that with most wars of the past 300 years, someone with mad, warlike intentions showed up, and the injured parties had to do something about it.
No non-violent philosophy can sustain a society for long when it refuses to acknowledge that war, if not always necessary, will always have an outcome that matters; that the victory of one or the other will make a moral difference. It is always necessary to take sides, because no opposing claims are equally just, not in any human place except in the strange land of relationship counselors.
Those who wallow in the selfish contentment of an unearned peace; who condemn the willing warrior at his task, or who have never been down in the muck or war, or risen with outrage at the wickedness of an enemy, have much to learn about war and themselves. Passivity of this kind is a virtue untested. And even worse, as LBJ learned, capriciousness and restraint in Vietnam encouraged the Russians, not because we refused to fight, but that we fought with reluctance and moral confusion. The outcome mattered, but we acted as if it didn’t. Our enemies will always notice both failings and act accordingly. They know that it matters which side wins.

Looks to me like an Obama Rage Girl
YOu can also scroll down where it has comments. I feel sick!!!!

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From the Seattle Post

Wild Thing’s comment……..
We are seeing the cult of Obama take shape. God help our country.
Take a look at THIS…. OBAMA THE MESSIAH
And then there is THIS VIDEO called Yes We Can.
I cannot believe this is happening, and that so many people are this stupid. I am seeing it with my own eyes and I still find it hard to believe.

Before You Go ,,,Please Click to see video
About the CD:

“Before You Go” is offered as an expression of heartfelt gratitude to those who fought and won the Second World War – for their bravery, gallantry and sacrifices that assure the continued enjoyment of freedoms unprecedented in the history of mankind.
As we lose those who gave us so much to age and time, it is our hope that the wondrous technology of the age of Internet will help us to deliver this tribute and message of thanks to every surviving veteran of the Second World War, their families and descendants.
With our profound thanks to those who we can never adequately thank, and in the hope that you will help us spread our message, we offer “Before You Go”.
Though dedicated to the veterans of the Second World War, we view “Before You Go” to be equally applicable to all of the veterans of subsequent wars and current conflicts who have responded to the call of their country and placed their lives on the line on our behalf when asked to do so. We wish to thank all of those who have contributed their photographic services to this project without charge in order to add their thanks to the veterans who have given us so much.”

Wild Thing’s comment……..
This is a wonderful and very touching video tribute and thank you. It is an honor to post this here at this blog among Veterans other wars and those of us that have loved ones serving now.

….Thank you Mark for sending this to me.

John McCain Defends Amnesty & Open Borders Juan Hernandez

Wild Thing’s comment……..
Good grief, he says he doesn’t know previous positions of Juan Hernandez. Come on John at least don’t lie about it. Well at least he didn’t have this woman removed from the room like he did the other one in the TownHall meeting.

Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Cokie Roberts, and a tough U.S. Marine
Sergeant were all captured by terrorists in Iraq. The leader of the
terrorists told them that he would grant them each one last request
before they were beheaded .
Dan Rather said, “Well, I’m a Texan; so I’d like one last bowlful of
hot spicy chili.” The leader nodded to an underling who left and
returned with the chili. Rather ate it all and said, “Now I can die
content.”
Peter Jennings said, “I am Canadian, so I’d like to hear the song “O
Canada” one last time.” The leader nodded to a terrorist who had
studied the Western world and knew the music. He returned with some
rag-tag musicians and played the anthem. Jennings sighed and declared
he could now die peacefully.
Cokie Roberts said, “I’m a reporter to the end. I want to take out my
tape recorder and describe the scene here and what’s about to happen.
Maybe someday someone will hear it and know that I was on the job
till the end.”
The leader directed an aide to hand over the tape recorder and
Roberts dictated some comments. She then said, “Now I can die happy.”
The leader turned and said, “And now, Mr. U.S. Marine, what is your
final wish?”
“Kick me in the ass,” said the Marine.
“What?” asked the leader? “Will you mock us in your last hour?”
“No, I’m not kidding. I want you to kick me in the ass,” insisted the
Marine. So the leader shoved him into the open, and kicked him in the
ass.
The Marine went sprawling, but rolled to his knees, pulled a 9 mm
pistol from inside his cammies, and shot the leader dead. In the
resulting confusion, he leapt to his knapsack, pulled out his M4
carbine and sprayed the Iraqis with gunfire. In a flash, all the
Iraqis were either dead or fleeing for their lives.
As the Marine was untying Rather, Jennings, and Roberts, they asked
him, “Why didn’t you just shoot them in the beginning? Why did you
ask them to kick you in the ass first?”
“What,” replied the Marine, “and have you three Assholes report that
I was the aggressor?

….Thank you SSgt Steve (USMC)