90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, March 11, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2018

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Girls With Guns

Illegal immigration is costing taxpayers $151 billion every year — a 30% increase since 2017.

“The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2023,” a report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), concludes that taxpayers spend $182 billion annually on illegal immigrants. That number is partially offset by illegal aliens paying $31 billion in taxes. FAIR estimates that tax revenue is collected from 15.5 million illegal aliens — far more than the government’s 11.3 million estimated illegal alien numbers, which are based on population surveys.

The cost to taxpayers supporting 11-15 million people who refused to go through the legal process of crossing the border and applying for a green card that would allow them to work in the U.S. isn’t really the point. It’s the loss of sovereignty. Every other nation on earth is allowed to determine who gets in and who stays out. Why America has to be different in this regard is a mystery.

Fox News:
While illegal immigrants are not eligible for the majority of federal welfare programs, the study also takes into account services, such as education and food assistance programs, provided to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants and also programs that they may be eligible for at the state level.

The largest cost that FAIR identifies is K-12 education, which the group estimates costs a total of $78 billion a year. Health care – including uncompensated hospital expenditures, Medicaid fraud and Medicaid for U.S. born children – is estimated to cost $42.7 billion a year. Costs related to criminal justice at the federal, state and local levels, which includes federal immigration enforcement, are estimated at approximately $47 billion a year.
“As America struggles to meet countless societal needs while facing the realities of our staggering $31 trillion national debt, the costs of providing for millions of people who have no legal right to be in the United States continues to grow at an alarming rate,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement.

Adding $151 billion to a $31 trillion national debt is immaterial. It’s the drain on resources — criminal justice, healthcare, and education — that matters. This is especially true since the costs of illegal immigration varies from state to state.

California spends $31 billion on illegals — far and away the most of any state. The cost to Texas is $12 billion, largely because the state doesn’t dole out benefits to illegals that encourage more of the same.

The authors note that it is difficult to get a clear picture of the illegal immigrant population, given many sources rely on self-reported data and many such immigrants are reluctant to reveal information to avoid discovery by authorities. The report also faults a lack of transparency from government agencies when it comes to data on the subject. As a result, estimates of not only costs but also how many illegal immigrants are in the U.S. overall, have varied wildly depending on the group. Groups that have called for looser immigration restrictions have challenged FAIR’s previous studies.

The report comes as the U.S. is still being wracked by a historic migrant crisis that saw more than 1.7 million migrant encounters in FY 2021 and more than 2.3 million in FY 2022. FY 2023 has so far eclipsed the numbers from the prior year, although the Biden administration has linked a sharp drop in numbers between December and January to policies it rolled out in early January.

The Biden administration — much to the chagrin of...

Visage à trois #1322

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #981

FBI Whistleblowers: Threat Tags Were Used to Target Conservatives

In the latest stunning testimony from whistleblowers at the FBI, it has been alleged that the bureau actively used intelligence threat tags to label multiple groups of conservative activists as potential domestic terror threats.

According to Just The News, one such whistleblower told the House Judiciary Committee over the weekend that a terrorist threat tag originally created to target far-left activists who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices after the overturning of Roe v. Wade was ultimately flipped to the opposite purpose, and instead became a marker for pro-life activists that the FBI considered dangerous for simply protesting at abortion clinics.

Whistleblower Garret O’Boyle told the committee that the threat tag “THREATTOSCOTUS2022” was created so that the bureau could “look into … pregnancy centers.” However, O’Boyle was then instructed to talk to a pro-life informant “about the threats to the Supreme Court.”

“I was like, ‘why would this person know about those threats? He’s pro-life.’ Like, he’s not the one going and threatening the Supreme Court Justices,” O’Boyle explained in his testimony, before going on to admit that he was never once asked to look into actual acts of domestic terrorism that were carried out against pro-life pregnancy centers or churches, many of which were violently attacked after the Supreme Court’s decision was made final.

Similar threat tags were used to label as possible domestic terrorists several other conservative affiliations, including parents who protested far-left, race-baiting, and overtly sexual curriculum at public schools, as well as American Catholics who attend Latin Mass.

O’Boyle also detailed how the FBI asked him to “divide one domestic terrorism case into four separate cases” in order to make it seem like he had a bigger caseload.

“It was one case, but the FBI had me open up four different cases,” O’Boyle explained, “because they had me open a case for every individual that I had an articulable, factual basis that there may have been...