Talk Politics

Comment

Comment by Mike Stark on July 21, 2010 at 12:35pm

She is lying if she is implying they are happening in Arizona, per the fact checking in the link provided.

BTW, Breitbart and Fox outright lied about Shirley Sherrod as well -- and Obama folded up like a beach chair. Certainly some of the Hillary supporters will be handing out the "I told you so" message, and I can't say that they are wrong. So if any of you have me on their "Obamatron" list, you can remove me now.

And yes, politicians lie all the time -- Reagan selling SDI as a leakproof roof was an example. But at least this example was in the same ballpark as the truth that missiles can be intercepted and this helps deterrence. A lot of politician's lies are exaggerations of this sort -- Al Gore and the Internet is another example. In the current case, it is the brazen and easily refutable nature of these lies, as in both the Shirley Sherrod and the birth certificate cases, that distinguish a certain slice of the American right.

Comment by Robert Hartman on July 21, 2010 at 9:01am

The Arizona Latino Republican Association will become the first Hispanic organization in the country to actively oppose the Department of Justice's lawsuit against the state of Arizona's new immigration law
. Maybe this will help put to rest the racism issues

Comment by greg delany on July 20, 2010 at 10:57pm

AZ Gov Brewer isn't telling lies about drug cartel beheadings Mike, You just don't want to admit it.

Why are beheadings so popular with Mexico's drug gangs?




CUERNAVACA, Mexico — The preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel henchmen is to capture enemies and behead them, a once-shocking act that has now become numbingly routine.

Since March 22, authorities have come across four separate grisly scenes of beheaded bodies, in one case with several heads placed neatly in a row.

Dozens of people have been decapitated in recent months, most of them apparently members of rival drug gangs locked in turf battles over narcotics routes, betrayals of loyalty and territorial influence.

One morning earlier this week, four bodies were thrown on a sidewalk along a service road of radiator shops and garages abutting the main highway leading from Mexico's capital through this city to the south and on to Acapulco, the Pacific beach resort. One of the bodies was missing its head.

As is usual in drug-related beheadings, a sign was left next to the bodies. It was addressed to Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a Mexican-American drug trafficker known by the nickname La Barbie because his light complexion makes him look like Ken, the companion of the Barbie doll. "Here are your homosexuals," the note began. "This will happen to all the traitors and those who support you."

Within hours, government workers had carted away the bodies and scrubbed the scene nearly clean of bloodstains. Locals declined to talk.

Decapitations by drug cartels in Mexico first began in 2006, and that year armed thugs swaggered onto the white tile dance floor of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, a town in Michoacan state, and dumped five heads from plastic garbage bags.

The blood-curdling act shocked Mexico, and evoked images of Islamic terrorism half a world away.

"These guys are copying the methods of al Qaida (terrorists)," said Jorge Chabat, a criminal justice expert at the Center for Research and Teaching of Economics in Mexico City. He said the Mexican drug lords saw Internet video of beheadings of hostages captured by Muslim extremists in Iraq and Pakistan, and adopted the tactic themselves, down to the posting of video on the internet.

Decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic — dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid. Cartel goons have moved away from that method, however.

"Dissolving the bodies in acid didn't bring them the same spectacular results," said Arturo Arango Duran, a security consultant in Monterrey, the industrial and business hub in the nation's north, referring to media coverage. "This is all part of a plan to use publicity to control territory through terror."

Experts suggest that the drug gangs have several motives. First, they seek to use beheadings to cow the citizenry from squealing on them and to pressure local authorities to collaborate. Second, the gangs try to out-macho each other with greater acts of macabre violence, frightening rivals in a murderous spiral.

The only hitch is that all the drug gangs have taken up beheadings.

"Even though everybody does it, it still works. That's the problem," Chabat said. "If you're a trafficker and you know that this is part of the game, the idea of having your head decapitated is not attractive."

National print media in Mexico now downplay the beheadings, giving them scant paragraphs and limiting the publicity the cartels once received.

The pace of drug-related violence is quickening. March was the bloodiest month yet with 958 deaths, El Universal newspaper reported Thursday. Since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006, confronting drug cartels, 18,757 people have died, it said.

"They are plumbing the depths of brutality now — the beheading of people, dissolving people in acid, doing the massacres in addiction centers, you know, throwing peoples' bodies in ditches," said Bruce Bagley, an expert on narcotics trafficking at the University of Miami.

Beheadings in recent days occurred across the country:

In Acapulco on the Pacific Coast, two nephews of the city's deputy transit director were found dismembered and beheaded on March 22. A sign near the bodies said it was vengeance against those who supported drug lord Hector Beltran Leyva, a bitter rival of La Barbie.


On a rural highway north of Monterrey, the beheaded bodies of a rural police chief and his brother were found in a Chevrolet pickup truck March 26. Assailants used the blood from the victims to scrawl "CDG," the Spanish initials for the Gulf Cartel, on the windshield and the driver's door.

The Gulf Cartel, based in Tamaulipas state, is locked in a bloody feud with a group that once provided muscle to its leaders. The armed wing, known as Los Zetas, struck out on its own in 2008, and the killings between the two have continued nonstop.


In Apatzingan, a city of 100,000 people in Michoacan state, four heads were left in a row next to a statue to Lazaro Cardenas, a former president, on March 31. A sign said it was vengeance by enforcers of the brutal criminal drug gang known as La Familia against Los Zetas, and suggested that a Zetas chief known as "Rufo," should search for an Internet video to see how the beheadings were carried out. (A video was posted on the Web, but YouTube removed it, citing a "terms of use violation.")

In an indication of the frequency of decapitations, local media in Michoacan said Apatzingan alone has been the scene of 18 beheadings since the beginning of the year.

Comment by ctyankee on July 20, 2010 at 9:31pm

I'd say it's because they got so used to the "liar" moniker, that they had to turn up the heat just to reach a simmer or to take notice.

objoke:

Q: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
A: His mouth is moving, or not...

:^)

Comment by Robert Hartman on July 20, 2010 at 8:05pm

Why is it that now when a politician makes any move they are called racist? What happened to the good old days of when they were just liars?

Comment by greg delany on July 20, 2010 at 2:51pm

Your cracking me up now. Our local AZ hero Sherriff Joe. Has been doing raids on businesses after getting credible info that companys have hired illegals. What has that gotten him? The Obama Justice Department investigating him for racism. Our state has an E verify law on the books that Sherriff Joe enforces. He also has had his deputies sworn in to be ICE enforcement agent. He is constantly followed by illegal alien advocate groups and harassed. His life has been threatend to many times to count. If anyone is inflaming the situation politically, it is the OBAMATRONS. This administration is looking for a new minority voting block and it will grant amnesty by hook or crook before the term is completed to try and get re-elected. Welcome to the most moral and transparent administration in Democrate history.

Comment by ctyankee on July 20, 2010 at 9:27am

I dunno Mike, I'd rather deal with a hundred inflammatory situations of *werdz* than a single physical crime committed by an illegal on a citizen.

It's no stretch of the imagination when the prison population is sampled, that not all of the illegals are in there because of petty drug possession. Nope, a lot of them are in there for violent offenses.

This open border policy is ludicrous. You're correct that part of the problem is that we create a demand for cheap labor, and we all know that nature abhors a vacuum. The illegals flood in to fill the void.

If we were to ban employers from hiring illegals, and sanction employers that violate that one simple law, not only would we end the illegal problem, we'd eliminate the unemployment problem.

But that's not what the Administration wants. That's not what the Congress wants. And it not what the SCOTUS wants either.

And when all three branches of "government" want the same thing, you *know* that trouble is just around the corner.

Comment by Mike Stark on July 20, 2010 at 9:06am

Point missed again. I am not painting everyone who is concerned about illegal aliens a racist. I am calling Gov. Brewer a racist for lying about Mexicans to inflame the situation politically.

Yes, the border is a real issue. But the reason for the problems are not in Mexico but in America -- our appetite primarily for cheap labor and secondarily for illegal drugs. Lurid stories about non-existent beheadings by scary brown people does NOTHING to solve this.

How many of you Arizonans hire illegal aliens yourselves? Know someone who has an illegal nanny or gardener and doesn't turn them in? Is unwilling to raise taxes to support la migra in having more raids like Operation Rollback, in which Walmart was found to be hiring company full of illegals to clean their store? If you fit in any of these categories, you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

Comment by greg delany on July 19, 2010 at 10:38pm

in more trouble than I thought*

Comment by greg delany on July 19, 2010 at 8:15pm

Mike ,
If the border patrol has caught 170,000 since Oct 1st and you are not concerned, then we are in brouble thyan I thought. That is only the number caught which is a small percentage af the real number getting accross the border. The drug cartels and Terrorist coming across our borders are smarter than the average migrant worker trekking across the open desert.
http://www.pro8news.com/news/70084462.html
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=104&sid=1977729
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2145821/posts
http://patdollard.com/2010/07/mexican-narco-insurgents-adopt-iraq-a...
http://symptomsofcocaine.com/7616/mexican-drug-cartels-using-terror...

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 63
• 64
• 65
• 66
• 67
• …
• 113
• Next ›
• Page