Paying the Piper

Monkey diplomacy is expensive

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Excerpt:

Well, it has finally happened. The crisis born of unilateralism, strategic overreach and bravado
has come to pass. With U.S. forces tied down in two protracted wars, American credibility
at a record low and our dependence on foreign oil painfully obvious, a revitalized Russia is
on the move. And the blow has fallen where most analysts expected it would: on America's
closest ally in the Caucasus, the tiny Republic of Georgia.

Conciliation, not confrontation, should have guided American foreign policy in Eastern Europe
during the past decade. Instead, Washington continued to poke the Russian bear with a stick.
If the U.S. could act unilaterally to invade a sovereign state, why couldn't Russia?

Woman who had dogs cloned wanted in Tennessee

A woman who made headlines by having five pups cloned and was linked to an abduction case in England is also wanted in Tennessee on charges she tried to plan a burglary in 2004, a defense attorney and prosecutors there said.

Joyce Bernann McKinney was charged in Carter County with criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and failure to appear in court, said attorney David Crockett, who represented her in the Tennessee case.
Authorities there said she instructed a 15-year-old boy to break into a house, and Crockett said she needed the money to buy a false leg for a beloved horse.
Crockett said Thursday he hasn't heard from her since she skipped a court date, but after seeing television coverage of the cloning case, he's certain she's the same person known to the world as dog lover Bernann McKinney.

Prosecutors are reviewing charges against the 58-year-old McKinney to decide whether to pursue the case, said Melanie Widener, an assistant district attorney for the county in the northeast part of the state near the North Carolina state line.
"It'll depend on where she is now, how important the case is, how much it would cost the taxpayers and whether witnesses are still around," she said.

McKinney declined comment when reached by phone Thursday.
McKinney was arrested in November 2004 in Tennessee in a van with the 15-year-old, according to a Carter County Sheriff's Department arrest report.
McKinney, then living across the state line in Avery County, N.C., needed money to help her three-legged horse, Crockett said.
"She loved it dearly," Crockett said.
"She was a rather bizarre character, and seems to have a strange circumstance now."
He recalled that McKinney had two or three dogs in her car when she conferred with him about her case.
"There was a strong aroma about her, and I told her this needed to be taken care of before I went to court with her," Crockett said.

McKinney made news around the world this summer when she had five pups cloned in South Korea from her beloved pit bull Booger.
She later confirmed she was Joyce McKinney, who in 1977 became a British tabloid sensation over the kidnapping case.
She faced charges of unlawful imprisonment after she was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.
She jumped bail and was never brought to justice.

"She is bold to put herself on worldwide television," Crockett said. "She must know she's a fugitive in at least one state."

With the previous post so sadly making its words ring hollow I thought I would remind us all of the entire text of the oft quoted "Give me your tired ..."
Come this November the words may not ring as hollow as they do now.

The New Colossus

by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is wrong plain and simple

This is how the cabal treats us ...
They make a mistake and we are responsible for it ...

Man whose US immigration notice was sent to the wrong address is detained with untreated spinal cancer until he dies, denied access to his wife and children

A Hong Kong computer programmer who had legally resided in the US for 15 years (since he was 17) and fathered two American children went for his final green card interview and was locked up, detained until he died of cancer that the DHS refused to treat him for. He had overstayed a visa (the DHS sent a key notice to the wrong address), and this prompted the DHS to lock him away and demand that he waive all right to immigration appeal and be immediately deported. In detention, his complaints of excruciating back pain were treated as fakery, and he was dragged around in shackles after he lost the ability to walk, taken on long, bumpy drives while official demanded that he drop his immigration appeals. The jailers who caused his death were private contractors with fat deals with the DHS to lock up immigration detainees.

As he lay dying, his family -- wife and two children, aged 1 and 3 -- were denied access to him while the warden considered their request to visit.

"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses..."

But his condition continued to deteriorate. Once a robust man who stood nearly six feet and weighed 200 pounds, his relatives said, Mr. Ng looked like a shrunken and jaundiced 80-year-old.

“He said, ‘I told the nursing department, I’m in pain, but they don’t believe me,’ ” his sister recalled. “ ‘They tell me, stop faking.’ ”

Soon, according to court papers, he had to rely on other detainees to help him reach the toilet, bring him food and call his family; he no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them. On July 26, Andy Wong, a lawyer associated with Mr. Cox, came to see the detainee, but had to leave without talking to him, he said, because Mr. Ng was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and a wheelchair was denied.

On July 30, according to an affidavit by Mr. Wong, he was contacted by Larry Smith, a deportation officer in Hartford, who told him on a speakerphone, with Mr. Ng present, that he wanted to resolve the case, either by deporting Mr. Ng, or “releasing him to the streets.” Officer Smith said that no exam by an outside doctor would be allowed, and that Mr. Ng would not be given a wheelchair.

Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands