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My discussion with a woman whose husband was killed by a drunk-driving illegal immigrant

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Net annual cost of illegal immigration
Net annual cost of illegal immigration

Before we get to my conversation with my friend whose husband was killed in a car accident when an illegal immigrant with NO driver’s license, NO auto insurance, who was intoxicated from alcohol, I wanted to show you a news story that shows how things like this are not so unusual.

Here’s the story from the Daily Caller:

A multi-vehicle crash last week that claimed the life of the son of a Knoxville, Tennessee fire department captain was the result of a “chain reaction” begun by an illegal immigrant driving in the wrong lane, investigators said.

Pierce Kennedy Corcoran, 22, the son of Knoxville Fire Department spokesperson Captain D.J. Corcoran, was driving a Honda Civic south on Knoxville’s Chapman Highway the evening of December 29 when a Chevrolet pickup truck driven by Franco Cambrany Francisco-Eduardo reportedly veered into their lane and struck the vehicle.

[…]44-year-old Franco Cambrany Francisco-Eduardo, an illegal immigrant, was arrested and charged with criminally negligent homicide as well as having no driver’s license or proof of financial responsibility, according to the News Sentinel, and was jailed without bond pending ICE action.

Since Tennessee is NOT a sanctuary state, the criminal will not be released to re-enter the United States illegally, and then commit another crime, and another, and another. This is what would happen in sanctuary states where Democrats govern. Instead, Tennessee handed the killer over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

People like to say that most illegal immigrants don’t commit violent crimes, but the real conclusion to draw here is that if this illegal immigrant had NOT been in the country, then that 22-year-old son would still be alive for his parents. He shouldn’t have been here. We can’t control the violent crimes of people who are supposed to be here, but that doesn’t mean that we should make things WORSE by letting in people who should not be here.

You can read the statement from the victim’s mother here.

It happened to someone I know

A friend of the blog had her husband killed by an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk, without a driver’s license. I had a call with her on Wednesday night to find out what happened. The illegal immigrant was driving in the wrong direction in their lane at full speed. Her husband was killed, she went into a coma, and her young child was injured. The illegal immigrant was drunk. He had no driver’s license. He had no auto insurance. When they caught him, he was packing his bags to go back to Mexico. And after serving his sentence, he was released without any kind of civil suit against him.

She was not able to get any restitution from the ranch that illegally employed him. She was not able to get any restitution from the strip bar where he became intoxicated before the accident. She was not able to get any restitution from the car dealer who sold him a car without requiring a driver’s license and proof of insurance.

After his release, it would be easy for him to re-enter the country illegally, and commit another crime. This happens all the time, for example, in the case of the illegal immigrant who just murdered a legal immigrant policy officer in California. That criminal had been deported FIVE TIMES, but he just kept walking through our border again and again.

I think it is very important to focus on the stories of the law-abiding victims of illegal immigrants who commit crimes. Not all illegal immigrants commit crimes. But all the crimes committed by illegal immigrants could have been deterred by tougher border security.

Whenever I hear Democrat politicians talking about illegal immigration, they are always silent about the law-abiding taxpayers who are impacted by illegal immigration. But those same Democrat politicians who like to spend YOUR money and risk YOUR lives are not liable for restitution if their lax immigration policies cost you your money or your life.

The cost of unskilled immigrants to taxpayers

Even if illegal immigrants don’t commit violent crimes, there is still a cost to taxpayers.

The Washington Times reports on the latest numbers from the Census Bureau.

Excerpt:

The latest Census Bureau numbers find that more than seven of 10 households headed by immigrants in California, and nearly the same amount in Texas, are on the taxpayer dole.

[…]According to the latest numbers from 2014, fully 63 percent of non-citizens are living off at least one welfare program. That translates into 4.68 million households.

[…]What’s most troublesome about the Census findings is the fact that the 63 percent of non-citizens on welfare actually grows to 70 percent for those who stay in-country 10 years or longer — meaning the entitlement mind only solidifies.

Meaning non-citizens on welfare don’t tend to get off welfare.

If we want to let in more people from other countries, then we should loosen up our process for admitting skilled immigrants who 1) have a job offer and are continuously employed and 2) pay taxes and 3) follow the law, 4) cannot collect one dime of welfare money, and 5) cannot bring in any relatives through chain migration. We should speed up the process for skilled immigrants to get their permanent residency. At the same time, we should build the wall, implement e-verify, prosecute businesses that hire illegal immigrants to the full extent of the law, and we should cut off all federal money for states that contain sanctuary cities.

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Education Secretary Betsy Devos scores a victory against public sector union

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Secretary of Education Betsy Devos
Secretary of Education Betsy Devos

Although you would never know it from the mainstream news media, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos is doing her best to advance a taxpayer-friendly agenda in education policy.

Here’s the latest from the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank:

In a noteworthy development, DeVos’s team this month radically revamped the collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the 3,900 employees at the U.S. Department of Education. The new CBA, between the Department and Council 252 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), includes big changes from the 2013 agreement negotiated under the Obama administration.

The new agreement doesn’t address compensation or benefits, of course, since those are governed by federal law, but it does include a raft of sensible, taxpayer-friendly changes.

The new CBA eliminates the set-aside of “official time” for union business. Under the old agreement, designated union representatives were free to work on union business during normal, government hours — all on the taxpayers’ dime. The old CBA stipulated that “no fewer than 75” (!) union stewards across the country could work up to 40 hours a year on “official time,” while another three union officers would devote 100 percent of their time to union business. Henceforth, union business will be done on union time, rather than on the taxpayers’.

Under the old agreement, department employees were given only a solitary 48-hour window each year in which they could opt out of union membership; miss that, and they were automatically enrolled. Henceforth, employees who wish to be in the union each year will be free to do so, and they will have an extended period in which to enroll — but they will have to actively choose to join.

The revamped accord also removes the requirements for “pre-decisional consultation.” Under the previous CBA, the department was required to consult the union before every agency-wide decision that could be construed as affecting the work of employees (such as transferring employees from one office to another, or even shifting employees from one project to another within the same office). Now, the department needs only notify the union of such decisions.

Under the new CBA, the union will be charged “fair-market rent” for the use of government office space and federally furnished equipment to conduct union business. Under the Obama-era accord, taxpayers were required to provide space and equipment to the union free of charge.

More generally, the new agreement removes a number of provisions that added burdensome procedural directives above and beyond statutory requirements when it came to things such as telework and grievance procedures.

If there is one thing I expected from Betsy Devos, it’s taxpayer-friendly education policy.

Unfortunately, the Republican party didn’t help her very much in that massive $1.3 Billion spending bill that they passed, with Democrat support. Betsy wants to cut federal spending on education, and return control of education policy to the states and municipalities. But the GOP just gave the Department of Education a bigger budget. We really need to switch out some of these big government Republicans for authentic conservatives.

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Does Planned Parenthood provide prenatal care and mammograms to women?

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How many abortions does Planned Parenthood perform?
How many abortions does Planned Parenthood perform?

(Source)

A new video put out by Live Action takes a look at the claim that Democrats make that Planned Parenthood provides prenatal care to pregnant women.

But that’s not all – what about the claim made by Democrats that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms to women?

Life Site News explains the myth and the reality.

Excerpt:

The day before hundreds of pro-life activists prepared to flood Planned Parenthood’s offices with requests to schedule a mammogram, the organization issued a statement admitting that they do not offer the cancer screening procedure at any of their facilities.

The calls were placed today as part of “Call Planned Parenthood to Schedule Your Imaginary Mammogram Day” – an event organized by pro-life activists in response to President Obama’s statement during the presidential debate Tuesday that the abortion organization offers mammograms.

“There are millions of women all across the country, who rely on Planned Parenthood for, not just contraceptive care, they rely on it for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings,” the president had said, repeating a claim he had made earlier this summer in an interview with Glamour magazine.

But Obama isn’t the only one.

The notion that Planned Parenthood offers mammograms is one of the most enduring myths about the abortion giant. The claim is regularly trotted out by pro-abortion politicians eager to defend taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, but wary of invoking its controversial status as the country’s leading provider of abortions.

Not only does Planned Parenthood not provide mammograms, but the abortions they perform have been linked to the epidemic of breast cancer that is afflicting women today.

What about the claim that only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does is doing abortions?

False:

Practically every defender of the organization, fighting to preserve its federal funding, reverts to the 3 percent figure. How could you possibly, they ask, defund a group that devotes itself overwhelmingly to uncontroversial procedures and services for women?

[…]The 3 percent factoid is crafted to obscure the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business. The group performs about 330,000 abortions a year, or roughly 30 percent of all the abortions in the country. By its own accounting in its 2013–2014 annual report, it provides about as many abortions as Pap tests (380,000). The group does more breast exams and provides more breast-care services (490,000), but not by that much.

The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services. So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.

By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test, and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.

Such cracked reasoning could be used to obscure the purpose of any organization. The sponsors of the New York City Marathon could count each small cup of water they hand out (some 2 million cups, compared with 45,000 runners) and say they are mainly in the hydration business. Or Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season, so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do.

Supporters of Planned Parenthood want to use its health services as leverage to preserve its abortions, as if you can’t get one without the other. Of course, this is nonsense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides free or low-cost breast- and cervical-cancer screenings — without aborting babies. State health departments provide free cancer screenings — without aborting babies. Community health centers provide a range of medical services — without aborting babies.

I think it’s a good idea to be able to respond to Planned Parenthood’s rhetoric. These are the people who kill babies, and we have to be able to respond to their false claims. When a majority of people learn the truth about the baby killing business, it will stop.