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If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

by JosefHueber Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Impeachmania peaked last week. After the House approved Speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit alleging executive overreach by President Barack Obama, Democrats pounced, blanketing the media and donors’ inboxes with dire warnings that Republicans would soon resort to impeachment. Boehner, for his part, dismissed the hysterics as a fundraising ploy. “It’s all a scam started by the Democrats at the White House,” he said last week, vowing that the House had no intention to begin impeachment hearings while he still held the speaker’s gavel. But Boehner’s control over his unruly tea-party-tinged caucus has proved tenuous time and again, and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the unofficial leader of the Impeach Obama Caucus, has floated a new (and no less quixotic) solution: If Boehner won’t let the GOP caucus impeach the president himself, Republicans should begin impeachment proceedings against members of Obama’s cabinet in his stead.

“I don’t think that John Boehner is going to bring about impeachment, which I understand, because what we really need is to remove Barack Obama from office, and the Senate has the power to remove the president, not the House,” Bachmann told activists on a call last Tuesday hosted by the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA. “The Senate is not going to remove him. So all we would do is effectively make the president a political martyr by impeaching him.” Instead, Bachmann suggested, the Senate might be more willing to take up articles of impeachment against the lower-level officials who follow Obama’s executive orders granting temporary reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants (why, exactly, Senate Democrats would be more amenable to this cause was left unclear). “For instance, I would nominate impeaching the head of Homeland Security who will execute the laws on the border,” she said, referring to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. “I think that we need to have a hearing, and we need to, if need be, bring about articles of impeachment and tell the president that if you issue these work permits, we are going to hold the person accountable who is going to execute your lawless law, and we will bring that person up for betrayal of public trust and we’ll impeach that official.”

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If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If Republicans Won’t Impeach Obama, Michele Bachmann Wants to Target His Cabinet Instead

Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

by Tamera0164 Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

A recently produced infographic from the Department of Homeland Security shows that the majority of unaccompanied children coming to the United States are from some of the most violent and impoverished parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The map documents the origins of child migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol from January 1 to May 14. It was made public by Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, and it includes the following analysis about the surge in child migrants:

…Many Guatemalan children come from rural areas, indicating that they are probably seeking economic opportunities in the US. Salvadoran and Honduran children, on the other hand, come from extremely violent regions where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the US preferable to remaining at home.

This echoes what I found in my yearlong investigation into the explosion of unaccompanied child migrants arriving to the United States. As I wrote in the July/August issue of Mother Jones:

Although some have traveled from as far away as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, the bulk are minors from Mexico and from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which together account for 74 percent of the surge. Long plagued by instability and unrest, these countries have grown especially dangerous in recent years: Honduras imploded following a military coup in 2009 and now has the world’s highest murder rate. El Salvador has the second-highest, despite the 2012 gang truce between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18. Guatemala, new territory for the Zetas cartel, has the fifth-highest murder rate; meanwhile, the cost of tortillas has doubled as corn prices have skyrocketed due to increased American ethanol production (Guatemala imports half of its corn) and the conversion of farmland to sugarcane and oil palm for biofuel.

Below is a more granular look at where kids are coming from, also produced by DHS. San Pedro Sula, the world’s most violent city, was home to the largest number of child migrants caught by the Border Patrol (more than 2,500). Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, sent the second-most kids, fewer than 1,000.

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Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing

Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests

by DeenaBumg Posted on August 13, 2013

Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Is this spy a cop or a private investigator? Either way, watch out.

What do you get when you mix America’s national security apparatus with TransCanada’s determination to build a tar-sands pipeline between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico?

A whole lot of arrests.

Earth Island Journal profiles the infiltration of peaceful Keystone protest groups by police and investigators — and in so doing paints a troubling picture of a government security force working in league with TransCanada:

On the morning of March 22 activists had planned to block the gates at the company’s strategic oil reserves in Cushing, Oklahoma as part of the larger protest movement against TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline. But when they showed up in the early morning hours and began unloading equipment from their vehicles they were confronted by police officers. Stefan Warner, an organizer with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, says some of the vehicles en route to the protest site were pulled over even before they had reached Cushing. He estimates that roughly 50 people would have participated— either risking arrest or providing support. The act of nonviolent civil disobedience, weeks in the planning, was called off.

“For a small sleepy Oklahoma town to be saturated with police officers on a pre-dawn weekday leaves only one reasonable conclusion,” says Ron Seifert, an organizer with an affiliated group called Tar Sands Blockade. “They were there on purpose, expecting something to happen.”

Seifert is exactly right. According to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, investigators from the Bryan County Sherriff’s Department had been spying on a Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance training camp that took place from March 18 to March 22 and which brought together local landowners, Indigenous communities, and environmental groups opposed to the pipeline. …

The infiltration of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance action camp and pre-emption of the Cushing protest is part of a larger pattern of government surveillance of tar sands protesters. According to other documents obtained by Earth Island Journal under an Open Records Act request, Department of Homeland Security staff has been keeping close tabs on pipeline opponents — and routinely sharing that information with TransCanada, and vice versa. …

The new documents also provide an interesting glimpse into the revolving door between state law enforcement agencies and the private sector, especially in areas where fracking and pipeline construction have become big business. One of the individuals providing information to the Texas Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division is currently the Security Manager at Anadarko Petroleum, one of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. In 2011, at a natural gas industry stakeholder relations conference, a spokesperson for Anadarko compared the anti-drilling movement to an “insurgency” and suggested that attendees download the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual.

The article, which includes scanned excerpts from documents the magazine obtained, is worth reading in full. For even more on the topic, read Earth Island Journal’s in-depth article from earlier this year: “We’re Being Watched: How Corporations and Law Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, Dolphin, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Undercover agents infiltrate anti-Keystone protests