The Biden administration has largely ignored efforts to get native-born Americans back into the workforce, instead adding millions of foreign workers to the labor market which adds downward pressure, particularly for working-class Americans in terms of finding jobs and securing higher wages. JOHN BINDER
Senate GOP Gives Victory to Kamala Harris, Her Big Tech Donors with Green Card Giveaway…. WITH KAMALA, JUST FOLLOW HER LONG HISTORY OF BRIBES SUCKING!
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/12/is-kamala-harris-another-closet.html
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
REVIEW: 'Guy Ritchie's The Covenant'
Boy, is Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant good—a riveting, intense, heart-pounding military thriller that packs more punch than any such movie since The Hurt Locker in 2008. And that’s a huge surprise coming from the titular Ritchie, a director who leaves his previous and annoyingly mannered work in the dust with this urgent and powerful film. Ritchie has spent 20 years making alternately giggly and pompous nihilistic bro-heist-crime nonsense, with the occasional break for a dreadful TV-show reboot (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., unwatchable), a horrid two-film conversion of Sherlock Holmes into an action hero in the person of Robert Downey Jr., or a wretchedly distended live-action version of Disney’s Aladdin with Will "Slapsy" Smith as the genie. You’d barely know that Guy Ritchie existed from watching The Covenant.
Aside from one irritatingly overcooked depiction of a post-traumatic-stress-disorder dream, Ritchie’s work here is all but unrecognizable. He suborned his own regrettable insistence on jumping up and down and saying, "Hey, look at me, I’m directing here" and used his technical facility to enrich and deepen the story he is telling. In so doing, he elevates a work of heightened melodramatic realism into the realm of fable.
The story is this: A team of American soldiers circa 2018 in Afghanistan is on its fourth tour of duty searching out Taliban IED factories. They’re led by Jake Gyllenhaal’s John Kinley, who has grown weary of their task because he and his men mostly go around pursuing bum leads and getting nothing done. The team secures a new Afghan interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim), a calm and focused man in his 30s who has angered previous American squads because he thinks he knows better than they do. As it turns out, he does, and when he’s not listened to, disaster strikes. Ahmed must take heroic measures to save Kinley, after which Kinley must take heroic measures to save Ahmed.
There are scenes of almost unutterable power here that simply involve driving down a barren road or a desultory moment that suddenly takes an unexpectedly menacing turn. Dar Salim, an Iraqi whose family fled to Denmark and has starred in several celebrated Nordic streaming dramas, is the sensational find here. Gyllenhaal’s Kinley is our stand-in, but it is Salim’s Ahmed who makes clear in every shot just what the stakes are in the battle for his country and in the battle to maintain his dignity and his soul. This is a towering performance, and if MGM knows what it’s doing, it will be planning a campaign that will lead to a best supporting actor Oscar for Salim.
Ritchie says he conceived the movie watching a documentary about the relationships between Afghan interpreters and the American and British military men they worked with. That was long before the Biden administration decided to pull all American forces out of Afghanistan, stranding thousands of Ahmeds—who had been promised visas to America if necessary in exchange for their service—in a Taliban-led nation where they are being hunted and killed.
The Covenant ends up a fable, or an allegory, because by the end, the audience realizes that Kinley is not just an everyman but the best of us—haunted by his obligation and determined to fulfill his responsibilities. Contrast that to how America has behaved since July 2021 toward the Afghans with whom we made a covenant.
Ritchie and his collaborators have made a terrific action movie that puts us to shame.
Two Years After Botched Withdrawal, The Biden Administration Has Yet to Properly Vet 88,000 Afghan Refugees
The Biden administration has yet to properly vet over 88,000 Afghan refugees who were resettled in the United States after its botched military withdrawal, which lawmakers say raises "serious national security concerns for the state of U.S. homeland security."
The Department of Homeland Security "encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all evacuees" arriving stateside after the rushed 2021 evacuation that killed 13 American servicemen, House Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R., Tenn.) and subcommittee chairs August Pfluger (R., Texas), Dan Bishop (R., N.C.), and Clay Higgins (R., La.) said Monday in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The pair further notes that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection also "lacked critical data to properly vet evacuees" but nonetheless admitted thousands of Afghan refugees who landed in America without passports or basic identifying information.
"Not only did the Biden administration’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan threaten our allies in the region by allowing the Taliban to return the country to a terrorist breeding ground," Green told the Free Beacon, "but the failure of DHS to properly vet or screen all Afghan nationals during the evacuation has put the U.S. homeland and our security interests at great risk."
While many Republicans in Congress have focused on the bungled evacuation itself, the vetting deficiencies remain one of the most active and pressing national security concerns, particularly since these Afghan refugees are already situated inside the United States.
Green and Pfluger are demanding the Biden administration hand over a trove of documents, including classified information, as part of the House GOP’s larger investigation into the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan. The pair notes that lawmakers still lack a full understanding of what went wrong with the withdrawal because Homeland Security "has stonewalled requests from committee members for information" from the outset.
Homeland Security—like the State Department and other agencies—has been blocking investigations into Afghanistan since late 2021. A litany of document requests and other investigatory efforts "remain either wholly unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied," according to the letter. "President Biden and his administration must be held accountable, and we will ensure its compliance with the Committee’s serious requests."
The failure to produce these documents could result in a subpoena, a primary vehicle for Congress to force the Biden administration to comply with its investigations. The House Foreign Affairs Committee hit Secretary of State Antony Blinken with a subpoena in late March for his failure to disclose classified information believed to show that American officials knew the Taliban would rise to power soon after the withdrawal.
The Homeland Security Committee wants Homeland Security to provide all internal communications about Afghanistan from January 1, 2021, to the present. This includes "all documents and communications between or among employees of DHS referring or relating to CBP’s screening, vetting, or inspection of Afghan evacuees," according to the letter.
It became clear soon after the withdrawal that the Biden administration knew it could not handle the influx of refugees but still ordered the military to fill planes to "excess" with unvetted individuals, according to an internal August 16th, 2021, directive that leaked to Congress.
"Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available. Err on the side of excess," the order stated, according to Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.).
Lawmakers were also informed during a classified December 2021 briefing that "not all security and vetting measures have been taken to ensure the safety of our homeland," the Free Beacon reported. "It is beyond unacceptable that several months after President Biden's disastrous and deadly withdrawal we still do not have … a full account of the Afghans who were evacuated to the U.S.," Hawley and other lawmakers said at the time.
The Homeland Security Committee’s investigation comes just weeks after former U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials told Congress that Afghanistan "is once again a terrorist safe haven" under Taliban rule. Officials are particularly concerned that DHS and other intelligence agencies no longer have vetting networks in place that could thwart a future terrorist attack.
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