Human Events finds illegal immigration top issue

Among our respondents 90% are age 45 or older, 69% are male, 96% are Caucasian, 43% have household incomes above $75,000, 57% have at least a bachelor’s degree, and 36% are Veterans.

We asked readers to choose the top 5 social or political issues that concern them the most. The percent indicates the percentage of people that listed the issue in their top 5 concerns.

Top Issues:

Illegal Immigration/Border Control 77%

Terrorism 55%

Government Spending 55%

National Defense 42%

Second Amendment Preservation 41%

Energy Independence 40%

Abortion on Demand 31%

One Party Government Control 30%

Jobs/Economic Climate 29%

What can we take from these results? Americans are concerned about the economy but more deeply worried that the enemy of our Union is failure to guard what is most precious: United States citizenship. Illegal immigration is an assault on our citizenship and a devaluation of what American means.

Here, finally, is a comprehensible, but incomplete, explanation of Obama's stance toward the jihadists

At the end of the day, all jihadist terrorists can really do is kill. But the more they kill, the more they alienate their fellow Muslims. As the French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the reason jihadists turned their attention to the United States in the first place was because they utterly failed in the 1990s to overthrow the governments of Algeria and Egypt. They failed because the more people they killed, the more hated they became. And when they lost popular support, they were easily crushed.

In recent years, the dynamic has been playing itself out again. In countries like Pakistan and Jordan, where al Qaeda keeps slaughtering innocent Muslims, its public support has fallen off a cliff. During the Bush years, the only thing that kept al Qaeda from complete ideological collapse was Muslim hatred of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our unblinking support for Muslim dictatorships and for Israel, and our use of torture at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

Now Obama, by pledging to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and close Gitmo, and by eschewing torture—in other words, by not overreacting to the terrorist threat—is cutting al Qaeda’s throat. Although the U.S. government is still not exactly loved in Muslim nations, it is hated less. Between 2008 and 2009, according to Gallup, approval of U.S. policies rose 23 points in Tunisia, 22 points in Algeria, 19 points in Egypt, 17 points in Saudi Arabia and 13 points in Kuwait. In Indonesia, according to the Pew Research Center, approval of the U.S. rose 26 points. And not coincidentally, al Qaeda’s slide seems to be accelerating. Between 2003 and 2009, according to Pew, support for Osama bin Laden has dropped 34 points in Indonesia, 28 points in Pakistan, 28 points in Jordan, 20 points in the Palestinian territories, 16 points in Lebanon and 13 points in Turkey. In Indonesia and Pakistan, much of the decline has occurred in the last year alone. Bin Laden is having so much trouble demonizing the United States that his last audio tape focused on climate change.

Chicago man implicated in terrorism in Denmark, India

It started as an odd case of the FBI raiding a meat packing plant with hundreds of agents and now it's morphed into something much bigger. I've been telling you for weeks this was coming. I guess it just seemed too hard to believe that an American was involved.

Originally David Headley was only charged with plotting to blow up the newspaper in Denmark that published the Mohammad cartoons. That plot seemed rather amateurish and was thought of as aspirational. But it soon became obvious to any one paying attention that Headley also had a hand in India's worst act of terror this decade.

The importance of this being that radical Islamists are now using their American passports to bypass suspicion that would normally be put on them if traveling under, say, a Pakistani passport. They are using their American citizenship to plot and execute terrorist plots abroad.

And this is not too fine a point to make either for Headley was originally born Daood Gilani and only changed his name to make it sound less Muslim and more flyover country American. He also admits he did this to make international traveling easier.

Fear of crime and terrorism drives up gun sales all over U.S., with growth up to 30%

Smith & Wesson, the famed American gunmaker once owned by Tomkins, the British conglomerate, expects to nearly double its annual sales in the next three to five years as demand for its firearms soars in the recession. It is not alone.

All over America demand for firearms and ammunition is rising amid concerns that rising unemployment, which passed 10 per cent this month, will lead inexorably to higher rates of crime. Fears of terrorism have also helped to lift demand, as have concerns among gun owners that the Obama Administration may introduce restrictions on gun ownership and impose additional taxes.

Smith & Wesson is expecting sales to rise by 30 per cent to $102 million (£61 million) in the first quarter of the next financial year, after growing by more than 13 per cent this year to $335 million.