Posted on 01/02/2007 8:48:13 AM PST by Dane
And you are unwilling or unable to provide evidence to support your baseless claim.
The basis for your other opinions is therefor equally unreliable.
My mother is fighting for her life in the hospital now (and has been for the past 3 weeks). This episode was caused by what a witness described as "4 Hispanic males" running a stop sign and hitting her car, causing her to go down an embankment, across a creek, up another embankment. I cannot prove that they are illegal, due to the fact that they didn't stick around. Common sense tells me that my mother may die from these pieces of human excrement and that they were indeed here illegally. This stuff is happening at an epidemic rate in this country. This is a woman who spent her life moving around the world supporting her career U.S. Air Force husband. She is repaid by a lousy government that doesn't even have the spine to enforce it's borders. I hope the people responsible for this invasion rot in hell.
Prayers for your mother's recovery. Don't bother with Dane - he really cannot be knocked off his quest to import cheap labor. As long as he can save a nickel on his lettuce the invasion from abroad is really not a big deal.
Don't even try to reason with Dane. No amount of American Blood spilled is enough for Dane or the open borders crowd to be convinced that illegal immigration has deadly consequences. People like Dane have an ocean of blood on their hands, and unfortunately, this includes Bush.
But as you have seen, he willfully, skillfully refuses to engage directly.
Wow, my bad. I thought Dane was a dude. If I had known I was dealing with a left-lane driver, I wouldn't have expected a reasonable discussion. <;-)
That's OK. I have a theory that Dane is actually an automated response Bot, spewing out preprogrammed nonsense that doesn't require any logic.
"IMO, a deep current of marxist rhetoric(i.e anti-private business)"
Why are you so against LEGAL businesses operating within the law Dane?
My impression too was that Dane was
male but one who knew no boundaries -- like a transnational sodomite.
"and the far right hates business because of who they employ providing those goods and services."
Stupid remark. The far right (law abiding businesses) hate having to compete with lawbreakers.
"...entitled to a govt. largesse for his profession of being a medical researcher, while he scolds those who do such good things such as build shelter or grow food."
Illegally, you forgot.
LOL, I love how yunz bring in selectively searched news headlines and ad hominems to try to attack those who wish not to stereotype a whole ethnic group on the basis of some bad individuals.
Using your "logic" the actions of jeffrey dahmer and ted bundy, who murdered appx. 40 innocent people between them, should represent every person in America of European extraction.
Phone extortion coming from behind bars in Mexico
Houston Chronicle ^ | Jan. 2, 2007 | MARION LLOYD
Posted on 01/02/2007 11:12:18 AM PST by SwinneySwitch
Mexico now rivals Colombia as the hemisphere's kidnapping capital, with an average 1,200 abductions a year, according to the government.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico's fastest growing crime racket is being run out of the big house.
All an inmate needs is a cell phone — smuggled in with a reported $5,000 bribe to guards — and a list of potential victims.
Then the lucrative game of telephone extortion begins. The criminals call at random, and the message rarely varies: "Hello, we've kidnapped your son. Pay up, or you will never see him again."
Sound too simple to be true? Think again. In a country ranked among the top kidnapping havens in the world, such threats are chillingly effective.
And they're skyrocketing — from eight reported telephone extortions in 2001 to 3,753 in 2005 — according to local newspaper reports citing the Federal Investigative Agency. The agency, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, had registered another 1,647 complaints nationwide by mid-September, the latest figures available.
Agency and prison officials did not respond to repeated requests for information or interviews. Experts, however, say the real number of extortions is probably 10 times as high, because most crimes go unreported in Mexico.
"Those figures are just the tip of the iceberg," said Jose Antonio Ortega, a lawyer who practices in criminal courts and serves as president of the Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.
Perhaps more alarming, the Federal Investigative Agency estimates that 80 percent of the calls are made from inside prisons, often by experienced kidnappers who continue to ply their trade from behind bars.
Ransoms range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, experts say. Victims pay either by depositing money in specified bank accounts or buying cell phone cards and providing the callers with the access codes. The callers then use those cards to continue the extortion.
"That shows the measures adopted within some prisons, like blocking cell phone signals, have failed to stem the problem," the agency concluded in a recent report, according to El Universal newspaper.
"Obviously, this is due to the negligence or collusion of the Federal District authorities," said Ortega.
His group compiled figures on the number of accused or convicted kidnappers in Mexico City jails. They tallied 532 convicted and 186 awaiting trial.
"That's a lot of potential extortion artists," he said.
The criminals find easy prey in Mexico.
"They don't have to say much to scare you nearly to death," said Lucero Serrano, a 60-year-old biologist who was a victim of telephone extortion in September.
"They told me they had my son and they were going to kill him if I didn't deposit money into an account," Serrano said. When the callers kept referring to her son, a grown man, as "the child," she knew it was a ruse.
"I was so scared, but then I realized they had no idea who they were calling," she said.
Like most residents of this teeming metropolis of more than 18 million people, Serrano is no stranger to crime. Her house in the upscale San Jeronimo neighborhood has been burgled 17 times, she said, once at gunpoint.
However, the kidnapping threat left her shaken.
Extortionists capitalize on that fear, reportedly hitting pay dirt in 15 percent of their attempts.
"The problem is that they make you feel like they know who you are, even if it's all a lie," said a Mexico City business executive who has been involved in anti-crime campaigns.
Despite his experience, including once negotiating a kidnapping ransom, he fell prey to a telephone extortion in 2004.
"They said, 'Listen carefully. We've been watching your family, but we don't want anyone to get hurt,' " recalled the man, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardizing his crime-fighting credentials.
The callers demanded $20,000. But to his surprise, they accepted just $350 after he insisted he couldn't get so much cash on short notice.
The government is aware of the problem but seems helpless to stop it.
Hazael Ruiz, the new director of Mexico City's eight prisons, told reporters in December that fighting telephone extortion was among his top priorities.
Last year, telephone companies began putting messages on all calls made from public phones inside prisons, alerting recipients of their origin. Prison authorities have also tried blocking cell phone service in prisons.
But those efforts have largely failed, partly because neighbors have complained about losing their own service, said Oscar Tukumaga, a criminal lawyer who frequently visits clients inside the city jails.
Moving north?
Former Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca acknowledged before leaving office on Dec. 1 that many of the drug lords jailed during his watch continued to run their businesses from behind bars.
However, the executive and anti-crime activist offered a silver lining to the telephone extortion problem.
The chances of tourists being victimized are "incredibly remote," he said, since callers target Mexicans whose names appear in local phone books or cell phone lists.
Business may be so good in Mexico that some enterprising crooks are setting their sights north of the border.
After the recent kidnapping of Laredo businessman Librado Piña Jr. and his son, the Texas city suffered a raft of extortion calls to local residents, according to the FBI.
The caller was a Mexican man who threatened to hurt businessmen and their families if they didn't wire money into Mexico, the Laredo Morning Times reported.
Local FBI agent Norman Townsend, speaking to a Morning Times reporter, summed up the criminals' modus operandi.
"These people," he said, "are capitalizing on the fear factor and are out there to make a quick buck."
marionlloyd@gmail.com
Remember the communist Soviets tried the same thing and their problems never went away.
The basic principle is called putting your head in the sand and in history it has not worked.
One lesson I would hope the Republicans learn this time around is that if you remain loyal to your leader you will prevail. And a further lesson for the right is that when you disrespect your leader you are booted to the curb by the electorate. And when an insignificant minority of the party such as the true conservatives claim ownership of the Republican Party and are allowed to condemn moderate Republicans as RINOs, then it is time to make them understand that a majority ofRepublicans are comprised of more than hard right social conservatives and could be permitted to claim the Pat Buchanans and Tom Tancredos of the world are the actual RINOs.
Yuh know maybe you should actually try to run a small business by yourself, and not be at the whim of immigration nanny do gooders such as yourself and Tom Tancredo, that only put more regulations on small business, ala nancy pelosi.
BTW, Tom Tancredo hgas never worked in a for profit private business. The vast majority of his career has been on the taxpayer dime(i.e public school teacher or legislator).
Yes it is, by the millions.
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