What were we tweeting about today?

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Here's White House Press Secretary Jay Carney today fielding questions about Fast and Furious and the events surrounding Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry who was killed back in December of 2010 at a site where Fast and Furious guns were found:


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"We absolutely agree with the need to find out the truth about why Fast & Furious happened, why the tactic, again, was employed in the previous administration, in different operations and was stopped by this Attorney General, why it came about. And that's why the Attorney General referred it to Inspector General. That is why we have provided Congress every document that pertains to the operation itself that is at issue here when you talk about the family that you referred to," White House press secretary Jay Carney said at his briefing today.

"The Terry family," Carney said after ABC's Jake Tapper reminded him of the name.

Tweet: How can they be held responsible for #FastandFurious when they don't even know who it was F&F killed?


A gotcha moment? Perhaps, but with Fast and Furious now making itself comfortable in America's living room, how do you not know/remember the name of Brian Terry, let alone his last name? A sign of just how cavalier and/or out-of-touch these people are or should we cut Carney some slack as the assembled press corps, repesentative of the broader national media probably didn't know who the hell Brian Terry was before this week, either?

Anyway, shameful. Absolutely shameful.

And to think some reporter interrupting the President at a press conference lecture last week was deemed disrespectful.


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Big Media narrative fail

The L.A. Times would like you to know that things are so quiet along the Mexican border that, doggone it, our border patrol agents are having a tough time staying awake on the job.

The border fence ran right in front of Jeff Byerly's post, a straight line of steel that stretched beyond town and deep into the desert. As a U.S. Border Patrol agent on America's front line, Byerly's job was to stop anyone from scaling the barrier. Hours into his midnight shift, his stare was still fixed, but all was quiet.

He pounded energy drinks. He walked around his government vehicle. On the other side of the fence, the bars in the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado closed, and only the sound of a passing car broke the silence. Byerly, 31, switched on his DVD player. Minutes later, a supervisor knocked on the window: The slapstick comedy "Johnny English" was on; Byerly was fast asleep.

Wild foot chases and dust-swirling car pursuits may be the adrenaline-pumping stuff of recruitment efforts, but agents on the U.S.-Mexico border these days have to deal with a more mundane occupational reality: the boredom of guarding a frontier where illegal crossings have dipped to record low levels.

Porous corridors along the 2,000-mile border do remain, mostly in the Tucson area, requiring constant vigilance. But beefed-up enforcement and the job-killing effects of the great recession have combined to reduce the flood of immigrants in many former hot spots to a trickle.

Let's now take a break from the narrative and check back in with reality.

The federal government’s failure to protect Americans from foreign drug cartels, human smugglers, and potential terrorists was echoed by Richard M. Stana, the Government Accountability Office’s director of homeland security and justice issues, who told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last month that the federal government has operational control of only 129 miles of the southern border, which presumably includes the extra five miles that took federal bureaucrats the last two years to negotiate.


“The difficulties encountered by the Border Patrol to gain operational control are not the result of poor management or lack of resources,” Gene Wood, former deputy chief patrol agent in the Tucson Sector, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Natural Resources Committee last week. “It is simply an issue of denied access” by the Interior Department - which is clearly more interested in antelope than in national security.

“Environmental policies cannot take precedent over the safety and security of all Americans and that is exactly what is occurring today,” said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chairman of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

Rep. Bishop has introduced a bill that would prohibit Interior from using environmental regulations to prevent the Border Patrol from doing its job.

As our border with Mexico runs 1,954 miles that would be approximately 7 percent of that border of which we have control.




And as far as the environment goes...

...perhaps allowing the Border Patrol to do their job might be of some actual value to the Department of the Interior. Just a thought.

Read of the day

Great news…

Or consider the case of border inspector Margarita Crispin—“precisely the kind of border corruption case that alarms us,” says William Abbott, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s criminal branch in El Paso, Texas. In 2005, he says, a federal informant tipped off the Bureau that Crispin was deliberately ignoring traffickers who moved drugs and other contraband through her border post. Then, in the spring of 2006, a van that had just gone through Crispin’s lane sputtered out of gas. The driver abandoned the vehicle and fled back across the border into Mexico—and when other inspectors opened the van’s doors, they found nearly 6,000 pounds of marijuana in plain sight. Crispin couldn’t explain why she hadn’t noticed the stash when she had examined the vehicle, according to an FBI press release on the case and an official who worked on it.

The City Journal examines the Mexicanization of American Law Enforcement, here.

Try explaining this one at the job fair

Yep, being a Federal employee must be pretty sweet, especially in this economy. Decent pay, full benefits package and pretty much guaranteed employment. Well, guaranteed just as long as you aren’t an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who outs the the Denver District Attorney for cutting deals with illegals to lessen the odds of them getting deported.

Denver Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Cory Voorhis thought the citizens of Colorado should know about the practices of a former Denver District Attorney, Bill Ritter, who allowed 121 illegal aliens to minimize their risk of deportation through generous plea bargain deals. Mr. Ritter demanded an investigation and ICE Agent Voorhis was prosecuted in federal court. The jury saw through the political character of the prosecution and took only two hours to acquit Mr. Voorhis of all charges. The story should have ended there, but Mr. Voorhis lost his job because the federal government would not accept the jury verdict.

Between this case and the travails of border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, why on Earth would anyone want to get into that line of work?

Modern management techniques encourage employees to not be afraid to make mistakes and for management to back them up in the event of honest errors that were made in pursuit of a greater purpose. We’re thinking that ICE and Border Patrol employees would be satisfied with their management backing them up when they merely do their job.

More here on the discouraging goings-ons in Denver and El Paso, two sanctuary cities