Obama Administration Released Illegal Immigrants Charged with Homicide

Today on NRO

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Accountability is for the little people. Meet the New Serfs: You.

JOEL GEHRKE: Colorado’s GOP Senate candidate is even winning over the media. Cory Gardner Is Pitching a Perfect Game.

ELIANA JOHNSON: A preview of an important foreign-policy speech Rand Paul will give Thursday night. Rand Paul’s Non-Isolationism.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, many of the threats we currently face are self-created. America’s October Worries.

SLIDESHOW: Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

October 23, 2014

Obama Administration Released Illegal Immigrants Charged with Homicide

This administration lies, and lies, and lies:

New records contradict the Obama administration's assurances to Congress and the public that the 2,200 people it freed from immigration jails last year to save money had only minor criminal records.

The records, obtained by USA TODAY, show immigration officials released some undocumented immigrants who had faced far more serious criminal charges, including people charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, drug trafficking and homicide.

The release sparked a furor in Congress. Republican lawmakers accused the Obama administration of setting dangerous criminals free. In response, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it had released "low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal records," a claim the administration repeated to the public and to members of Congress.

The new records, including spreadsheets and hundreds of pages of e-mails, offer the most detailed information yet about the people ICE freed as it prepared for steep, across-the-government spending cuts in February 2013. They show that although two-thirds of the people who were freed had no criminal records, several had been arrested or convicted on charges more severe than the administration had disclosed.

Notice how many advocates of “comprehensive immigration reform” will ignore this inconvenient story and continue insisting the administration can be trusted to sort through the 11 million or so illegal immigrants and sort out the ones who are a danger to Americans.

God Bless Canada

Yes, this is Islamist terror:

Although Canadian police have not released the name of the Ottawa shooter, on Wednesday afternoon U.S. sources leaked that the suspect’s name is Michael Zehaf Bibeau, a 32-year-old Canadian who was a recent convert to Islam.

Mr. Bibeau’s name was first broadcast by CBS, allegedly via U.S. intelligence sources who had been in contact with their Canadian counterparts.

Later, Reuters also cited U.S. sources in confirming that Mr. Bibeau was a recent convert to Islam and may have been born with the name Michael Joseph Hall.

The suspect — who was reportedly born and raised in Quebec -- has a lengthy criminal past in Montreal, Aylmer, QC and British Columbia.

This could happen here. As if to punctuate it, last night there was another White House fence-jumper. He injured a Secret Service dog before he was subdued.

The Ferguson Anger and Protests, Built Upon a False Narrative

Ferguson was a particularly depressing story. Now we learn that the claim at the heart of the angry protests — that a cruel policeman shot a “gentle giant” for no justifiable reason — is not supported by the available facts:

Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown fought for control of the officer’s gun, and Wilson fatally shot the unarmed teenager after he moved toward the officer as they faced off in the street, according to interviews, news accounts and the full report of the St. Louis County autopsy of Brown’s body.

Because Wilson is white and Brown was black, the case has ignited intense debate over how police interact with African American men. But more than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony to a St. Louis County grand jury that largely supports Wilson’s account of events of Aug. 9, according to several people familiar with the investigation who spoke with The Washington Post.

Some of the physical evidence -- including blood spatter analysis, shell casings and ballistics tests -- also supports Wilson’s account of the shooting, The Post’s sources said, which casts Brown as an aggressor who threatened the officer’s life. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited from publicly discussing the case.

The grand jury is expected to complete its deliberations next month over whether Wilson broke the law in confronting Brown, and the pending decision appears to be prompting the unofficial release of information about the case and what the jurors have been told . . .

Experts told the newspaper that Brown was first shot at close range and may have been reaching for Wilson’s weapon while the officer was still in his vehicle and Brown was standing at the driver’s side window. The autopsy found material “consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm” in a wound on Brown’s thumb, the autopsy says.

Equally depressing is the doubt that this investigation will resolve the matter for many Americans. A great many people will conclude that the investigation is biased, that the witnesses are lying, mistaken, or have been intimidated, that the forensics are faked, and so on. They have their narrative, and they’re sticking to it.

Wendy Davis’s Perfectly Shameless Campaign, and Dispirited Democrats

Perfect. The Wendy Davis campaign has resorted to taking photos from other campaigns and claiming they’re her happy supporters.

Who knew Scott Rigell and Ed Gillespie were the candidates who “stood for ALL Texans”?

They’ve really reached a point of, “Hey, whatever, just try it,” over at the Wendy Davis campaign, huh? Laurence Person wonders when the Davis campaign will apologize for using the College Republicans’ photo. My guess is shortly after Godot arrives.

They never apologized — or even conceded any reason for objection — regarding their awful wheelchair ad. After the ad controversy, Kat McKinley wrote, “The Wendy Davis campaign is hoping this will blow over and the ad will inspire their base. The media might allow that to happen. Democrats tend to get away with things Republicans could never get away with. With so many things in the news, make sure all your friends and family are aware of this nasty ad. Send them the link to this story. Talk about it. This deserves even more backlash than it has already gotten. Even liberals see how wrong it is. Yet the Wendy Davis campaign will not pull the ad. This says as much about them as making the ad in the first place.”

Over in the Guardian, Jeb Lund offers a liberal viewpoint that I think a lot of conservatives would want to encourage. On the Davis ad, he concludes, “it’s hard to ignore that the opening shot would appeal to certain people who might think Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, is a ‘weak’ candidate.” (That appears to blame the ad viewer rather than the ad maker, but at least he acknowledges that there’s something out of bounds about the ad. Lund is also outraged by endangered Democrats running away from their liberal record and trying to sound like conservatives, asking what the point is if “liberal candidates refuse to stand up for their own party’s ideas, and instead cozy up to the Republican platform and employ the same dirty campaign tactics. What liberal voter wants to show up to witness that?”

Is that why Democrats seem to be doing so poorly in early voting in Nevada, Florida, Colorado, and Iowa?

ADDENDA: Thanks to the readers who checked their autographed copies of William F. Buckley books and letters. The verdict: Not only is the autograph in the book I purchased authentic, but apparently he used the same pen for forty years.

As we await the sterling success of our new “Ebola Czar,” Laura K. Fillault reminds us that “there are approximately 28 to 32 to 45 White House Czars, depending on the source,” including an “Asian Carp Czar”, a.k.a. the Asian Carp Director at the Council on Environmental Quality. [Insert joke about someone carping about Asians here.]

Speaking of obscure posts within the federal bureaucracy, I’m informed that
for the past few weeks, more copies of The Weed Agency have been sold in paperback than in e-book form. That’s not a complaint, more of a surprised observation. While I was driving along the US30 route along the Columbia River in Oregon, I saw a particular sign that seemed like something that would have fit in the story:

Adam Humphrey could have justified another $50 million just to fight “stowaway seeds.”

Fights I did not expect to read about: Tucker the pig vs. the Chesterfield County Planning Commission. Apparently one family’s pet pig was reported to the local authorities as “livestock” and thus against the law. No one knows precisely who reported the animal, but my money is on Bruce Braley.

At least NBC News medical correspondent Nancy Snyderman, who famously broke her quarantine because she wanted soup, has stayed off Twitter since October 5.

Courtesy of Jenn Jacques, an updated “COEXIST” bumper sticker from the NRA:

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