I get mail

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Found in my spam folder:

Myiq2xu, yesterday President Obama used recess appointments to name Richard Cordray the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and to fill the vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.

Please, send President Obama an email thanking him for this bold move.

Without these appointments, the National Labor Relations Board would cease to function as a defender of workers’ rights. Without a director, the CFPB couldn’t fulfill its critical function as a watchdog working to stop the fraudulent practices of mortgage companies, payday lenders, debt collectors and other financial interests that are bleeding Americans dry.

Republicans are livid. Failing to grind consumer and worker protections to a halt at the request of their Wall Street masters, Republicans are now claiming these appointments are unconstitutional (they’re not). Within hours of announcement, they began setting up congressional hearings.

This is a big effing deal, and credit should go where credit is due. Please send a thank you email to President Obama for making these recess appointments.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

P.S. Please chip in $5 to help support Daily Kos.

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Dear Chris:

I must admit I am conflicted about this.

The Senate Republicans have been stalling on the confirmation of White House appointments since Bill Clinton’s first week in office. When Bush was in office the Democrats returned the favor and Bush retaliated by using recess appointments.

It was Harry Reid who came up with the idea of holding “pro-forma” sessions each day to prevent Bush from doing so. Tit-for-tat, now the Republicans are doing the same thing.

We need quality people in government and neither party should block nominees for partisan purposes. Generally speaking, as long as they are qualified they should be approved. But that’s not what the Democrats were saying five years ago, now was it?

My biggest problem with this whole wankfestivus is that there is no doubt in my mind that Obama is only doing this for one reason and one reason only – to get hisself reelected.

Regarding your request for a donation – you want $5 and I want a happy ending. The customer always comes first.

myiq2xu

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What information/records should a POTUS candidate have to release?

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Four years ago the Obama campaign made a big deal about Hillary’s tax returns. When they were finally released it was a big nothing-burger. But it begs the question – What information/records should every POTUS candidate have to release prior to the election?

Should they have to show proof of constitutional eligibility? What about school transcripts? Medical records? Divorce files?

What should be required, what should be optional, and what records (if any) should be off-limits?

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The Blame Game

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First we start off with a weird story:

Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported

“It’s very frustrating,” Lorene Turner said.

She has spent hours on Facebook trying to find her granddaughter, Jakadrien.

“Once I get home I am up until 3 or 4 in the morning searching and looking,” Turner said. “It’s all I can think about. Finding my baby.”

Turner has been searching for Jakadrien since the fall of 2010, when she ran away from home. She was 14 years old and distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce.

Turner searched for months for a clue.

“God just kept leading me,” she said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and do whatever God told me to do, and I found her.”

Turner said with the help of Dallas Police, she found her granddaughter in the most unexpected place – Colombia.

Where she had mistakenly been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April of 2011.

“They didn’t do their work,” Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.

But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request.

“I feel like she will come home,” the grandmother said with tears in her eyes. “I just need help and prayer.”

There are still many unanswered questions about how an African-American girl who speaks no Spanish is mistaken for a foreign national. Immigration officials are investigating and released a statement late Tuesday.

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Then we get a lot of hysterical reactions by the usual suspects.

(ZOMG! Stormtroopers!)

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Things started to go wrong for young Jakadrien when she decided to run away from home. I’m gonna make a wild guess and say that there was probably a little bit more to this story than her being “distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce.”

We aren’t told where she was or what she was doing until she gets arrested for theft 250 miles away in Houston. We also don’t know who she was with or how long she was gone before she got arrested. But when she is arrested she gives a fake name. This was her third mistake.

It’s fairly common for people to lie about their identity to the cops. But when the fake name turns out to have warrants it usually jogs the person’s memory. This is where it gets weird.

All Jakadrien had to do was give the cops her real name and it would take two seconds for them to confirm she was a runaway. Did she tell the police or the ICE agents her real name? Did she say anything at all during the deportation process? If not, why not?

So she gets deported to Columbia where she is issued a work card and is cleaning houses until her grandmother locates her via Facebook? Jakadrien has a Facebook account in Columbia and she isn’t contacting anyone back home? WTF?

David Dayen:

But this is a massive error. ICE is supposed to base their deportations on fingerprint matches. In this case, they based it off this fake name. Jakadrien’s identity was never confirmed. She’s African-American, not Hispanic. She doesn’t even speak Spanish.

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Sorry Dave, but not everyone has fingerprints in the system that can be matched against. Lots of people in Columbia (as well as other parts of Central and South America) are of African descent. Many illegals don’t speak Spanish because they came here as little kids and grew up speaking English.

Here’s the big question: Why hasn’t Columbia sent her home yet?

Cases like this one don’t prove anything, except maybe you shouldn’t run away from home, steal and lie to the cops.

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