We already know the Obama administration has a relaxed border control issue on the US Southern border since they would rather sue states instead of enforce the law.

But now we have to go to a UK paper to realize Obama and his ilk are now quietly stopped its controversial practice of routinely searching buses, trains and airports for illegal immigrants at transportation hubs along the northern border and in the nation’s interior, preventing agents from using what had long been an effective tool for tracking down people here illegally, it has been revealed.

The Border Patrol, which patrols outside the official ports of entry handled by customs officers, has dramatically beefed up its staffing since 9/11, doubling to more than 20,000 agents nationally. Along the northern border, the number has jumped from about 300 in the late 1990s to more than 2,200.

• Along the northern border last fiscal year, the agency made 7,431 arrests

• Of 673 arrests in the sector, roughly 200 were from routine transportation checks

However, in recent years arrests on the northern border have dropped significantly from nearly 1.2 million in 2005 to 463,000 in 2010, and 97 percent of them at the southern border.

Has the drop in arrests occurred because of beefed up patrols? According to Department of Homeland Security the recession as a likely factor in the drop. Yes, the recession. We thought the recession ended two years ago. Why not blame Bush?

A check of the Bellingham, Washington bus station in 1997 yielded an arrest of Palestinian Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer. Abu Mezer skipped out on a $5,000 bond – only to turn up later in Brooklyn, where New York police shot him as he prepared to bomb the city’s subway system. Also, the would-be millennium bomb suspect Ahmed Ressam was arrested at the border in late 1999 when he left a ferry from British Columbia to Washington in a rented car full of explosives.

“We’ve had two terrorists who have come through the northern border here. To put these restraints on agents being able to talk to people is just ridiculous,” Gene Davis, a retired deputy chief in the Border Patrol’s sector in Blaine, Washington said.

“Abu Mezer got out, but that just shows you the potential that’s there with the transportation checks.”

As we proceed to the next election cycle immigration isn’t standing out as a big topic. The Obama administration doesn’t think illegal immigration or terrorism is a big topic either. The main stream media has largely ignored this discussion so we’re glad a paper in the UK let us know.

I recant, I recant, I recant my support for Rick Perry for President. Unless of course he’s the last one standing against Barack Obama. During my last day on vacation I decided to tune back into the world of American politics and watched the debate, my first. It was time to see the Republican candidates live.

YIKES – Between Romney flip flopping and Rick Perry telling us we don’t have a heart if we don’t believe in subsidizing illegal aliens education I found myself thinking we’re back to no top tier candidate that is a reliable Conservative. Romney is not a Conservative and never will be a Conservative no matter how often he tells us he’s a Conservative. That claim is a sinking ship.

Then we have Rick Perry, officially breaking the hearts of Conservatives with his chest puffing, daring to challenge the public on illegal immigration. Some nerve don’t you think?

As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru tweeted:

“How do you whiff on the Romney flip-flop hit and call yourself a politician?”

It’s very true Perry left plenty on the table in answering Mitt Romney responses but his answer concerning education of illegal aliens was beyond the pale. (Emphasis LCs)

PERRY: Well, I feel pretty normal getting criticized by these folks, but the fact of the matter is this: there is nobody on this stage who has spent more time working on border security than I have.

For a decade, I’ve been the governor of a state with a 1,200-mile border with Mexico. We put $400 million of our taxpayer money into securing that border. We’ve got our Texas Ranger recon teams there now.

I supported Arizona’s immigration law by joining in that lawsuit to defend it. Every day I have Texans on that border that are doing their job.

But if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children, because they will become a drag on our society.

I think that’s what Texans wanted to do. Out of 181 members of the Texas legislature, when this issue came up, only four dissenting votes.

This was a state issue. Texans voted on it. And I still support it greatly.

Rick Santorum provided the best response to this:

SANTORUM: Governor Perry, no one is suggesting up here that the students that are illegal in this country shouldn’t be able to go to a college and university. I think you are sort of making this leap that, unless we subsidize this, the taxpayers subsidize it, they won’t be able to go.

Well, most folks who want go to the state of Texas or any other state out of state have to pay the full boat (ph). The point is, why are we subsidizing?

Not that they can’t go. They can go. They just have to borrow money, find other sources to be able to go.

And why should they be given preferential treatment as an illegal in this country? That’s what we’re saying.

Later in the debate Perry comes up with a great response to Michele Bachmann concerning mandating that 6th graders get the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer but unfortunately a little fact checking demonstrates Perry was disingenuous in his reponse:

I got lobbied on this issue. I got lobbied by a 31-year-old young lady who had stage 4 cervical cancer. I spent a lot of time with her.

She came by my office talked to me about in program.

Patricia Kilday Hart/Houston Chronicle writes that Perry was accurate but misleading:

“I got lobbied on this issue,” Perry acknowledged. “I got lobbied by a 31-year-old young lady who had Stage 4 cervical cancer. I spent a lot of time with her. She came by my office, talked to me about this program.”

All of which was true. But it left the impression that Perry was moved by the woman’s story to sign the order. In fact, three weeks before meeting [Heather] Burcham, he had invoked the policy that ignited a firestorm of controversy with the Texas Legislature. Lawmakers thought the decision would best be left to parents, and filed bills to rescind the order.

That’s when Burcham got involved. Wracked by an illness that would claim her life only six months later, she came to the Texas Capitol to advocate for the HPV vaccine.

“The vaccine has done its job if it saves one person from cancer, let alone knocks out cervical cancer altogether,” she told reporters. “It’s my wildest dream come true that I get to maybe reach one person, that my life would not be in vain, that I have lived for a purpose and that I won’t die and never have done anything.”

At the time, Burcham was living with the family of Houston businessman Craig Wilson.

“Heather started babysitting for us in 1997,” Wilson, the father of four daughters, told me last week. “We fell in love with her. She was kinda like a daughter to us.”

He visited the Capitol with Burcham, and saw a friendship blossom between her and Perry.

“He developed a relationship with her,” Wilson said last week. “Heather had his personal cellphone number. She talked to him all the time.”

Shortly after her visit to Austin, Perry invited her to visit a friend’s ranch. There, he showed her how to fire a rifle, and took her for a spin on the back of a motorcycle — two things she had never experienced.

“He spent personal time trying to get some items on her bucket list crossed off before she died,” Wilson said. Perry kept in contact with Burcham until her death, and spoke at her memorial service — two months after the Legislature passed the bill striking his executive order.

Perry’s focus on Burcham was an accurate — and yet misleading — explanation of his HPV order.

Misleading or a lie the response was inaccurate, easily checked and leaves listeners with questions, especially on top of the immigration response.

Debates are important because voters want to hear and see the candidates, they want to make a decision. The latest straw poll out of Florida suggests Romney and Perry are very satisfying to Republicans.

Mr. Perry was the only top-tier candidate to declare himself all-in for the straw poll, organized by the Republican Party of Florida and held in Orlando. His supporters had targeted the 3,500 delegates, and Mr. Perry himself had poked some other candidates for side-stepping the event.

But Herman Cain won the poll with 37% of the 2,657 votes cast. Mr. Perry finished a distant second, with just over 15%, Mitt Romney placed a close third poll, with 14%, Michele Bachmann carried only 1.5% of the vote finishing last behind the erstwhile Jon Huntsman who received 2% of the vote, Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum placed fourth, with nearly 11%. Texas Rep. Ron Paul won just over 10%, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich won just over 8%.

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Can America be saved? As we know, many American’s don’t like America as exceptional, one of a kind, a Constitutional Republic. Many American’s want us to look more like Europe, maybe even Eastern Europe during the Iron Curtain days. Maybe our cities and towns should resemble East Berlin before the “wall” came tumbling down.

Those so-called American’s are Marxists, Bolsheviks who are constantly playing the race card, the class warfare game, the anti-rich, anti-prosperous, anti-successful bunch who want redistribution of wealth, they want the so-called rich to pay up with their sweat equity.

Barack Obama was to be the left’s hero but many don’t like the fact that he hasn’t totally transformed America into a banana republic, third world afterthought. These people want hardcore socialism and the don’t want Conservatives getting in the way. Afterall, the Conservatives are radical, extremists, bent on destroying the America the Marxist have desired for decades.

Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, would change all that. Rick Perry isn’t a Beltway, status quo, DC parrot. Rick Perry has contempt for the politico’s in Washington and his record is one of success in Texas that hopefully would translate into success in all 50 states.

From the UK Telegraph:

It is a pocket of rural America that has changed little in a century and is about as far removed from the bustle and marble monuments of Washington DC as one could imagine.

But Paint Creek, where ranches and wooden homes, some now abandoned, are dotted beside cotton and wheat fields, is the place that defines the man who some Republicans believe could unseat President Barack Obama next November.

Governor Rick Perry was part of the fifth generation to work the land at Paint Creek, some 200 miles west of Dallas on the flat expanse of plains known as “the Big Empty”.

It was here that he was imbued with the country values of church, family, neighbourliness, thrift and hard work that now seem part of a bygone America beyond places like West Texas.

Back in the late 1950s, he was known as Ricky Perry, a mischievous boy, always smiling, who lived with his parents and older sister Milla in a rented wooden house that lacked indoor plumbing. He wore a cowboy shirt hand sewn by his mother, a locally renowned quilter, and his highest ambition seemed to be to become an Eagle Scout.

You won’t read positive stories about Gov. Perry in the United States press. They fear Rick Perry like they fear Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin.

“There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church, and Boy Scouts,” Mr Perry said last year, looking back on the late 1950s.

“That’s it. And it was plenty.” Paint Creek was “one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate” depending on the weather. As a child, he ventured, it was the home of “some of the most principled, disciplined people in the world, and faithful”.

America needs principled people, faithful people, the kind that believe in the can do American spirit of exceptionalism. Ronald Reagan was principled and we need a principled leader in the White House who will faithfully abide by the US Constitution, shrink the federal government, bring back optimism and pride in America the way President Reagan did. We need someone to reverse course in American and a leader who will, to paraphrase Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), “compromise means going along with my plan.”

Rick Perry will cross the aisle to inform the Leftist opposition that he won’t compromise his principles, he won’t compromise the Constitution and he won’t compromise American exceptionalism. Rick Perry won’t compromise our freedom and liberty.

Mr. Perry, who has championed Israel and called for a muscular foreign policy, has the ability to appeal to all five elements of the party – fiscal, social and national security conservatives plus the Tea Party. However, the “establishment” isn’t real crazy about Rick Perry and that’s a good thing. If you want change with plenty of real hope thrown in for good measure than Rick Perry is your man, your candidate.

Mr. Perry’s friends believe he never intended to run for president but now feels he has to move beyond his beloved Texas because his country is in peril. The coming months will tell whether the boy from Paint Creek could be hailed by voters as a potential national saviour.

I believe Rick Perry is the antidote for Marxism and Barack Obama. I now have my candidate for President of the United States.

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