Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the Independent Women’s Forum Senior Policy Analyst Patrice Onwuka to the newsmakers line to discuss her recent piece on Kamala Harris’s photo op and a short visit to El Paso while avoiding the real crisis at the Rio Grande Valley area.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line by our very good friend Patrice Onwuka with the Independent Women’s Forum. Good morning, Patrice.
Onwuka: Good morning, Michael. How are you today?
Leahy: Well, I just thought that the topic that you wrote about recently was funny to me.
Onwuka: Oh boy.
Leahy: Because Kamala Harris went down to the border kind of sort of for a photo op at the airport I think. How long was she at the border in El Paso, which is not the center of the problem?
Onwuka: She ended up staying a few hours, in addition to meeting some Border Patrol agents at a facility. I believe she also sat down with some local religious leaders.
I pegged her time originally at about two hours. She may have saved three or four. But certainly not enough time and definitely not in the right place to see the actual surge in migrants and surge in illicit drugs and other illegal activity going on at the southern border.
Leahy: Nothing says border control like meeting with religious leaders right? (Laughs) I mean, look, I love having conversations with religious leaders about issues of religion, but why, when she goes to the border, does she meet with religious leaders? Are they involved with the enforcement of our immigration laws?
Onwuka: I believe maybe some of them are involved with housing or providing services (Inaudible talk) and other service providers.
And listen, I love our civic community, religious community groups they are important. But I think even more important is actually going to the areas of the border where that is not an actual port of entry (Chuckles) where the people who are coming across are not doing so legally.
But actually going to to the areas where it’s actually worse where you’re seeing the smugglers, the coyotes dropping little kids in the middle of the night, and open fields where you’re seeing many groups of migrants distracting Border Patrol agents while drug smugglers are running fentanyl across our borders.
And by the way, that heads northeast, and west to every part of our country. I get that she wants to deal with the core issues and she wants to get to the root of the problem, but she also needs to deal with the immediate impact, and she’s not doing that.
Leahy: Well, I can tell her exactly how to get to the root of the problem. Are you ready? She needs to go and stand next to Joe Biden and then put a mirror up and look at those two people. Right? That’s the core of the problem, in my view.
Onwuka: Let’s go back to day one of the Biden administration in their haste to undo every Trump policy, particularly on immigration. They reversed some really powerful policies that were in place that were stemming the flow of migrants and forcing people, shocker, to apply for asylum in the nearest country of sanctuary instead of skipping three or four countries that want to apply for asylum at the closest safe place to you. But things like that were changed. And as a result, we’ve seen the signal going out to Central America and the rest of the countries. The policies have changed. Come on in now. The cartels have exploited this policy change to again recruit people who want to come to this country for whatever reason, I understand. But they’re exploiting the situation. The drug cartels are exploiting it for their own nefarious purposes. And we have an administration that is intentionally sticking its head in the sand because it doesn’t want to disrupt the very far left of its party and its wing who think that we should actually have no borders. And who are frankly, oh, happy to allowing as many people that want to be, with no regard for who they are, why they’re coming and where they’re going to go.
Leahy: Well, let me ask you this. You say that the Biden administration is intentionally “sticking their head in the sand.” Now you’re being, I think, generous to them.
You’re kind of saying it’s a little bit, it’s really incompetence. Is it incompetence or is it an intentional violation of American immigration law?
Onwuka: It’s intentional. Incompetence would be to say, well, let’s try something different and we get a different outcome. No.
We’ve seen for the past, probably five or six months now, the rise that it’s hitting. A 20 year high for illegal border crossings. When it hits the high one month that may be incompetence.
Beyond that, that is intentional. It’s undermining our immigration system and our immigration laws, which, yes, they can be fixed.
And our system is pretty broken. But we have a system and we have laws in place. And if you want Congress to fix it well work with Congress to do so.
But this is what happens when we have executive orders from Republican and Democratic presidents that can be undone by the next administration.
For folks out there, this is just the beginning. We are hearing that the White House is ready to overturn Title 42. What is Title 42 you ask?
It was a measure that was put in place under the Trump administration last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. In essence, individuals coming by themselves would be turned away at our southern border just for health and safety reasons.
That is going to end because there have been activist groups pushing the Biden administration calling Title 42 somehow uncompassionate and heartless.
Now what you’re going to see is a rise of people, families, family units, young people coming unaccompanied and single individuals who had been turned away at the border.
Now they’re going to be able to come and gain illegal entry. I had the privilege of being on a television network yesterday where I got to ask Tom Homan, who is a former head of the Southern Border Patrol, about this issue.
And he absolutely said, Patrice, you’re 100 percent right. We haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to what’s going to happen once Title 42 is overturned or reverse. And we’re expecting the Biden administration to do that any day now.
Leahy: Any day now. By the way, I think you point out in your column that El Paso is not exactly the hotspot for illegal entry into the United States. That’s what, 800 miles away in the Rio Grande Valley?
Onwuka: It is. El Paso is actually a port of entry, meaning that it’s guarded. It’s a place where you actually have to go in there and we know who you are.
We know why you’re coming. So what you’re not seeing are a lot of illegal entries there. You’re also not seeing the apprehension of, let’s say, fentanyl or illicit illegal drugs and guns coming through our port of entry.
Not surprising, right? Where it is going on is 800 miles away in the Rio Grande Valley area. This is where you’re having migrants dying in the Rio Grande trying to cross that river to get into the United States.
This is where we’re seeing the heartbreaking video of young people, babies, kids dropped over the border wall, left in the middle of the night by themselves by smugglers who are simply using these individuals as distractions to the border agents.
While the border agents are trying to take care of a little baby or taking care of a group of migrants these drug cartels are running fentanyl across our border.
They’re running drugs and other types of drugs and guns across our border. Now, for them, it’s a fantastic money-making enterprise that the Biden administration has allowed them to tap into.
Where I would have loved to have seen Vice President Kamala Harris go to is that area so that she could see not just the detention center, but see exactly what our border agents are being overrun overworked and what’s happening there so that they could figure out okay.
We do need to change our policies. We do need to work with Congress for a long-term solution. But it’s wonderful when you go to a place where it’s nice and easy and there’s a photo op, then you can pat yourself on the back and say that the crisis is under control, when, in fact, it is not.
Leahy: Patrice, what do you make of this character, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas? Every time you turn around, my impression of the guy is he’s a smart guy who is using legal ease to defend the flouting of American immigration law, which is a convention of his oath of office.
He’s the guy you write about. He’s the guy that picked El Paso as the place for Kamala Harris to visit. What do you make of this guy?
Onwuka: Well, he was put in place for a good reason, which is, he is smart. He looks great on television. He seems measured, seems calm, and seems like he’ll have things under control. But really, he’s just doing the bit of his bosses and trying to advance their agenda on immigration.
So you may be a sweet talker. You may seem smart, but if you are again flouting the law, or if your policies are directly responsible for the rise in illegal entries, the rise in people coming into the United States, I don’t think you’re doing your job.
You’re not doing a good service to the American people. And really, that’s who you work for. The American people. Not just the president, not just the vice president.
Listen to the full first hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Senior Editor-At-Large at The Epoch Times Roger Simon in studio to discuss his recent column about Joy Behar’s liberal approved anti-gay comment and Kamala Harris’s scheduled border visit.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the newest all-star panelist editor-at-large with The Epoch Times, my former boss at PJTV, a great novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and an Academy Award nominee for Roger Simon.
Simon: Former. Excommunicated.
Leahy: (Laughter) But now here with us.
Simon: Formerly.
Leahy: Formerly speaking of media entertainment types, your close friend Joy Behar is probably not too happy with the column you wrote today at The Epoch Times. Tell us about that.
Simon: Well, maybe we should take a look at what I actually said here. We can click on it. It doesn’t seem to be moving very fast.
Leahy: It’s slow. But you do recall. I mean, you remember what you wrote, right?
Simon: I made fun of Ms. Behar for her big gaffe the other day. A guy from the NFL finally came out as gay. This is after decades now.
Leahy: You may remember the very first NFL player who came out as gay after he was done with his career. Do you remember him? Dave Kopay. A San Francisco 49er who was a running back from the 70s?
A very marginal player. So he ended up basically, he ended up announcing he was gay. And it was a big deal back then. That was like 40 years ago. My point is, who cares, right?
Simon: That’s my point too. (Laughter) It’s not exactly wake-up news but it caused Joy Behar to make a nasty anti-gay crack.
Leahy: Really?
Simon: Which got all the other liberals on The Execrables Show, The View, which I never watched.
Leahy: You call it The Execrables. I love that adjective. Look it up, folks. It’s a good adjective.
Simon: (Chuckles) It’s a great one. As I say in the article, I never watch The View, except when forced to by cable TV showing endless clips.
Leahy: Yeah, right. Promoting it.
Simon: Demoting it in this case. It showed her making this kind of stupid, vulgar, anti-gay crack and all the liberals on the show going, (Laughs oddly)
Leahy: Laughing.
Simon: Laughing away.
Leahy: So if a Liberal icon moron, otherwise known as Joy Behar makes an anti-gay comment, it’s funny.
Simon: Exactly. But if you or I made an anti-gay comic, we would be banned from the public for 30 years. It’s the media equivalent of Siberia. So I wrote about it in a slightly more serious manner, which is hard for me, but I did it. (Laughter) Most people talk about how liberals always use projection upon us Conservatives by calling us racist, sexist, blah, blah, blah, blah. Actually, I say it’s deeper and worse than that. That really if you look at things like CRT.
Leahy: Critical race theory.
Simon: They are all designed, actually, to oppress people and to gain power. And it’s not actually just projection about themselves. It’s really a more evil and kind of despicable thing. And people like Behar are not just about revealing their true selves but about doing bad stuff. So that’s what the column is about at The Epoch Times. And I commend your listeners.
Leahy: I think it’s a great column and funny, as usual.
Simon: And also, I commend The Epoch Times readers.
Leahy: By the way, I do want to bring to your attention a very interesting story at The Epoch Times. I don’t know if you saw it just published. 23 Republicans Move to Censure Biden for Dereliction of Duty at the Border. Did you see that story?
Simon: Yes.
Leahy: See, I agree with that sentiment. I’ve been talking about that. In fact, I think the way that they’re handling the border by ignoring and flouting our immigration lists, I think it’s actually an impeachable offense. What are your thoughts on that?
Simon: (Chuckles) Obviously, he’ll never be impeached.
Leahy: Not in this Congress but maybe in 2023.
Simon: Yeah, that’s possible.
Leahy: But of course, if you impeach Biden, what do you get? Kamala!
Simon: The column was about to write last night and instead, I wrote this other one but I may write tonight is the whole thing about Kamala going to the border because everybody’s been saying, oh when is Kamala going to go to the border? But the reality is who cares?
Leahy: Because what’s she going to do? Go and giggle? So she’s going to go to the border, giggle, say nothing and the establishment media will fawn all over her.
Simon: They’ll fawn all over her. But I think the public is beginning to get it I hope because what does it show? And if you bring 50 people to the border, what difference does it make?
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed U.S. Rep. Mark Green, a Republican congressman representing Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District to discuss his visit at the border, AOC’s word recognition prolems, and the HR1 bill.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line by our good friend, Congressman Mark Green. Congressman Green, welcome to The Tennessee Star Report.
Green: Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Leahy: How are you holding up there? (Laughter) That’s my first question. How are you holding up in Nancy Pelosi’s crazy out of control, House of Representatives?
Green: Well, I haven’t snapped yet, but it’s enough to drive a man to it. I mean, some of the stuff that’s just being proposed is absolutely absurd. And you look at stuff that Fox News blew up from an interview from the border with me where I talked about AOC. I don’t know if you saw any of that.
Leahy: I saw that. So tell our listening audience about that.
Green: Well, she had heard people talking about the surge at the border and thought that we were calling the children coming across the border insurgents because we used the word surge. No, surge means a high volume over a short period of time.
Leahy: Did you spell it out? Congresswoman Cortez, surge means a high volume.
Green: It has nothing to do with people attempting to overgrow government. They like to throw that word around, by the way, inappropriately many times. But anyway, I digress.
Carmichael: Question for you, Mark, this is Crom. HR1 passed the House. I know you all couldn’t do anything to stop that from happening. It’s now in the Senate. What’s your prediction on what’s going to happen there?
Green: Yeah. It comes down to Joe Manchin. I’m hopeful that he bears the pressure. It’s going to be incredible on him from his own party. But he has now said that there are parts of the bill that he could support. So the Biden administration and Chuck Schumer said we’ll split the bill up. Now, that means it has to come back over to the House unless they trim down and amend out the parts that he doesn’t like and then attempt to pass that.
Carmichael: But don’t they have to break the filibuster to pass anything that’s not budget-related?
Green: They do. But if he gets a bill that he’s willing to support, then that will support doing it under reconciliation or some other mechanism.
Carmichael: How? Then the filibuster must not matter on anything if an election bill can be passed under reconciliation, then nothing can’t be passed under reconciliation.
Green: That’s basically what Schumer is saying. He said that he’s going to do this reconciliation process many more times than has been done in the past. That’s exactly what he has said.
Carmichael: Okay, well, then I guess Mitch McConnell’s only response is to tell 50 Republican senators don’t enter the chamber ever, and then he doesn’t even have a quorum. So if he doesn’t have a quorum, he can’t conduct business unless he decides to redefine a quorum.
Green: These guys are doing everything they can to rewrite rules and the laws and they totally disregard the Constitution. HR1 is unconstitutional. So I don’t think they care about that.
Leahy: I don’t think they care at all about that. That makes your job very frustrating. And then when you’re dealing with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez misunderstanding words.
Carmichael: She doesn’t misunderstand it. This is what the Democrats do.
Leahy: Tell us more about how that border story blew up and the pushback against you on that Congressman Green.
Green: She was suggesting that everybody who notes the increase in the border, the surge that we’re racist. And that seems to be the mantra these days from the left. Anyone who points out, in fact, is a racist. They’re pouring across the Southern border. I’m standing there looking at 600 plus young girls in a small pod built for 33 and pointing out what’s going on because Joe Biden made ridiculous both foreign policy decisions and defense of our country, homeland security decisions that have resulted in this. This doesn’t make you a racist.
And them continually playing that racist card negates or lessens the chance that when real racism happens, we’re going to be able to spot it. And we don’t want to numb people to this word. That’s a very powerful and tragic thing when racism happens, and you should never abuse a term just for a political win. And that’s exactly what the left is doing these days. So if you’re a conservative, you’re racist and that’s inflammatory, frustrating, ridiculous. All the adjectives and you can come up with, but that’s the world we live in right now in politics.
Leahy: How can a legislative body function properly if every time the Republican Party says anything, the leadership of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the Big Tech all say, well, that’s racist. How can you have any serious dialogue about important issues?
Green: Thanks for bringing up the big companies. I guess I’m going to go up to the Delta counter now and say sorry, I don’t have a photo ID. I thought I could fly on your airline without a photo ID. Delta Airlines is pushing back against the Georgia law.
Leahy: A great law, by the way, a common-sense law. Voter ID to get an absentee ballot.
Green: It’s common sense. But that word is exclusive these days from certain Democrat leaders. Basically, we get up there and we message and we fight to take back the House.
Leahy: Well, I think you’re right. What are the prospects for taking back the House? We have 30 seconds left here Congressman Green.
Green: We have a tremendous opportunity here. We just need folks to help out, but we can take back the House. We are basically six seats away right now. We’ve got a special that’s coming up. We’ll win one of those, at least, maybe two. Then we’re going to need four seats. We can do that in just 19 months with everybody’s help.
Leahy: And that’s the key point. Everybody’s help.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Star National Correspondent Neil McCabe to the newsmakers line to discuss the unmasking and verification of the woman that blocked Senator Ted Cruz’s right to film migrants at the detention facilities on the southern border and a Harris presidency waiting in the wings.
Leahy: In studio with us is state Senator Mark Pody, the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. On the newsmaker line, breaking stories left and right our Washington correspondent Neil McCabe. Good morning, Neil.
McCabe: Hey. Good morning, guys. Really good to be with you, Mark and Crom.
Leahy: So I was not in the studio on Wednesday. I just have to give a note of congratulations to you, Neil for breaking that great story about John Kerry, former Secretary of State, of whom we captured a photo of him on a plane not wearing a mask, which is, of course, something that Joe Biden says you can’t do. The regulations say you can’t do it. But we got that photo that was all over the place two weeks ago for about 48 hours. It was the only picture that apparently you could see on Fox News. And it was a Tennessee Star breaking story. Congratulations on that get.
McCabe: Wasn’t that fun, Mike? And it’s always funny when you’re working with you and Christina before a story posts, you think you have something, but you’re not really sure. And it’s like we reached out to American Airlines. They came back to us and they said, what was the flight number? I told them what flight it was, and they passed our deadline. We gave them another 15 minutes. But you just can’t hold that thing forever. And once it took off, it just took off.
Leahy: It really did. It’s been the most-watched or viewed story in the history of The Tennessee Star. It was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of page views. So good job on that. Now we have another story. We are giving the other side an opportunity to respond. They haven’t responded yet, but we’re about to break a story today. Again, you’re breaking another story. We have apparently the identity of the woman who was blocking Senator Ted Cruz from taking videos of the young kids in these, I don’t know what you call them. In very terrible circumstances on the border detention centers.
McCabe: They are detention centers and it’s a horrible situation. I read yesterday that there are now more migrant children in custody under Biden than there ever was during the peak of Trump. And they just keep coming. And this woman was going left when Cruz’s camera went left. She went right when he went right.
And she quite literally was violating the constitution. A senator has a constitutional obligation for oversight. And the idea that somebody in the executive branch would jump in front of somebody’s camera while he’s trying to narrate a video and keeps interrupting him and talking over him. If she is willing to do that to a U.S. Senator, you can imagine what they’ve been doing behind the scenes to reporters.
Leahy: Exactly. And, Neil, we’ve had this story since, I think, Sunday night. And we know the identity. We have given the Department of Homeland Security plenty of time to confirm or deny. And I think we’ve given them until nine o’clock this morning. To borrow the old Howie Carr line, when the phone didn’t ring, we knew it was the Department of Homeland Security calling back to confirm or deny the identity of this person. Crom Carmichael.
Carmichael: What you’re doing is you’re giving the Department of Homeland Security the opportunity to deny that you have correctly identified this person.
Leahy: We are doing that.
Carmichael: You’re not asking for confirmation or they could confirm it? You are at least giving them a chance to say no. I’m sorry. You got the wrong name.
Leahy: Exactly right.
Carmichael: Neil, is this person an employee of the Department of Homeland Security?
McCabe: Absolutely.
Carmichael: So it wasn’t somebody from the Biden administration sent down there to tag along with the senators and try to disrupt them?
McCabe: Yeah, she’s a political minder. She’s like a commissar who’s been sent alongside the delegation and it’s her job to sort of corral.
Carmichael: So she did travel. She wasn’t somebody who worked there with those children day in, day out. She traveled down. Interesting.
McCabe: No, no, no. If we have ID her correctly, and I believe we have, she’s someone who’s from Texas, but someone who works in a very senior position in the Obama administration in the Customs and Border Protection. And she has returned to a similar position at Customs and Border Protection. So she is working in Washington. Ted Cruz already said at his press conference that she went to another Senator and demanded that he delete the photos that he had taken and threatened that if he did not delete them, she would throw them all out of the facility.
Leahy: Under what legal authority was that, Neil?
McCabe: No idea. (Leahy chuckles) Michael, we asked them what was her role and what rules were they supposed to be following? Now I will say that it is considered a violation of people’s rights if someone is in a refugee or detention or prisoner status, you’re not supposed to exploit them, which is why Cruz made the point that he would blur their faces. But other than blurring the faces of children that are only for propriety.
My view is if I can see and I’m on the sidewalk and I see something, I can take a picture of what I see. It’s not a secret. But we’ll see what happens when this thing launches. I also want to say with Biden coming out with a new tax increase and he’s putting that in front of the infrastructure bill that he’s going to release. And then he’s got behind that a gun confiscation or a big restriction of gun rights bill coming up.
And Biden is really loading some barrels onto that wagon and he doesn’t have the horses to pull it. He’s absolutely running out of time. I’ve said this before. He hasn’t yet addressed Congress. He does not yet have a director of Office and Budget Management confirmed. They haven’t even nominated secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and a slew of other positions. And Nancy Pelosi has a five-seat margin in the House. That is very very high. And as these Democrats look at the polls, and they look at that red wave that’s coming in 2022, they’re not going to go down with the Biden ship.
Leahy: But the good news, of course, is that the legal but not legitimate occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden has given an assignment to Vice President Kamala Harris, which is to go down to the border. What’s happened with that assignment?
McCabe: Yeah, she’s pretending she never got that assignment, and it’s a very interesting dynamic. And it happened a lot sooner than I expected is that you are now seeing the Biden and the Harris camps really develop into factions. And now you’re seeing some embarrassing leaks about Harris that she’s supposedly uncomfortable at Blair House. She’s impatient to get into her mansion. And that sort of comes from the Biden people.
And wait for the Harris people to start leaking. And remember, Harris’s sister, Maya Harris is married to Tony West, who is number three in the Obama Justice Department and who was basically in the running to replace or take the place instead of it going to Loretta Lynch. Loretta Lynch got that top job. But Tony West is very much a part of that Obama legal machine. And in Maya Harris was very much running her sister Kamala’s campaign. There is a government waiting that is centered around Kamala Harris. And the Biden people are showing that they don’t want to leave or be pushed out so quickly.
Leahy: Deliver us oh, Lord, from a Kamala Harris administration. That’s my prayer for today. Neil McCabe thank you so much for joining us. We’ll talk to you next week at the same time.
McCabe: Thanks, Michael. Be good.
Listen to the third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
