Archive for May 2010

Flushing Township board member Mike Gardner has let the Tea Party minded effort in the township.

FLUSHING TOWNSHIP, Michigan — A small group of residents became fed up with the way government was going and decided to make a change.

They attracted their like-minded friends who were against any tax increases and believed government needed to cut spending. That small group became a larger movement and they began to win elections.

Sound familiar?

Well, this Tea Party movement started two years ago in Flushing Township.

As the Taxed Enough Already crowd and other anti-establishment groups gain traction nationwide, they’re well-established — and actually have been the establishment around here since 2008.

With the election of Terry Peck as supervisor earlier this month, it is now well in power with five votes on the seven-member board.

“The biggest part of (the change) is the economy,” said Peck. “I think the economy dictated where voters were going.”

The Tea Party has gained notoriety for their “don’t raise taxes, cut government spending” rhetoric, made especially popular by former Alaska Gov. and Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin and the like.

Nationally the Tea Party and other anti-establishment groups have been turning heads by winning elections, despite the odds.

Established congressmen both Republican and Democrat — with the backing of heavy Washington hitters — have been uprooted in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Utah.

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At least 22 people were wounded in separate shootings around the city roughly between noon Saturday and noon Sunday, including a man who died this morning after he was shot in the head, Chicago police said.

At a news conference this morning, Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis said that nearly half of the shootings appear to be gang-related, including the fatal incident. Weis added that at least two of the other victims have refused to cooperate with police, “which makes the job of our detectives … far more difficult.”

One of the shootings was particularly disturbing because one of the female victims was eight months pregnant, the superintendent said. No one in custody for any of the incidents.

The most recent incident happened in the 8000 block of South St. Lawrence Avenue just after noon today, Chicago Police Officer Laura Kubiak said. A man at the location was shot in the hand.

Four people were shot about 3:15 a.m. today in the 9100 block of South Marshfield Avenue, police said. The victims — two women, ages 32 and 30, and two men, ages 40 and 41 — were sitting in a vehicle when a dark four-door sedan approached, a man got out and opened fire. The older woman and the younger man were taken to local hospitals in serious conditions, police said. The other victims suffered only minor injuries.

About 2 a.m. in the 10800 block of South Racine Avenue, two people were shot while they sat in a parked vehicle, police said. One victim, a 43-year-old man, was shot in the chest and taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center where he was listed in critical condition. The other victim, 22, was shot in the shoulder and was listed in “stable” condition at Roseland Community Hospital. Police said the 22-year-old is gang-affiliated. The men were shot by a passenger of a gold four-door car, police said.

About 12:45 a.m., a 16-year-old boy was shot in the 1500 block of East 67th Street. He was taken in critical condition to Northwestern Memorial Hospital with a gunshot wound to his arm.

About 12:30 a.m., a 28-year-old man was shot in the Roseland neighborhood in the 10500 block of South Corliss Avenue, police said. He was taken to Roseland Community Hospital with a gunshot wound to his right calf and was described as in “stable” condition.

California voters are closely divided over the crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona, with sharp splits along lines of ethnicity and age, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.

Overall, 50% of registered voters surveyed said they support the law, which compels police to check the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally, while 43% oppose it. That level of support is lower than polls have indicated nationwide.

But attitudes among the state’s voters are not uniform. Strong majorities of white voters and those over 50 support the Arizona law, while Latinos and those under 30 are heavily opposed.

Arizona’s adoption of the law in April stirred passions and protests across the nation, with cities including Los Angeles voting to boycott the state. The matter has turned into a pressure point in electoral battles, including the Republican gubernatorial primary in California. But the poll shows that most voters, even those with ardent feelings about the measure, said they were unlikely to reject candidates based solely on their immigration stances.

Those who oppose the law were more likely to say they would only support a candidate who agreed with them on that issue, with 1 in 3 making the Arizona law a litmus test for their vote. Supporters of the Arizona law were more likely to say they were voting on other issues.

Gina Bonecutter, 39, a Republican and fervent supporter of the Arizona measure, said she was frustrated by what she sees as unwillingness by recent immigrants to acclimate to American culture. The Laguna Hills mother and part-time educational therapist said large numbers of illegal immigrants are hurting public schools, one of the reasons she placed her four children in private school.

“What I’m seeing today is immigrants coming here, wanting us to become like Mexico, instead of wanting to become American,” she said. “That’s never going to work.”
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Shane McClellan after the brutal assault.

A 16-year-old boy from West Seattle says he was held hostage and beaten for hours, all because of the color of his skin.

Shane McClellan says two men kicked and whipped him at gunpoint - and told him they singled him out because he is white.

Tim McClellan, Shane’s father, says he barely recognized his son after the brutal assault.

“I didn’t know if he was alive or dead,” Tim McClellan said.

The incident happened as Shane McClellan was walking home from a birthday party at a friend’s house Tuesday around 2 a.m.

Shane says two men called to him from the top of a staircase near the intersection of 14th Avenue SW and SW Holden Street. The men asked for a light, and when Shane walked over to oblige, they knocked him to the ground and started kicking him.

The two men knocked the frightened teen around on the staircase, making racially charged remarks.

“They started bringing up the past - like slavery - being like, white people did this,” Shane said in an exclusive interview with KOMO News reporter Shomari Stone.

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President Obama has turned down Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s request to meet while she’s in Washington next week as tensions mount between his administration and Arizona over the state’s new law cracking down on illegal immigrants.

President Obama has turned down Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s request to meet while she’s in Washington next week as tensions mount between his administration and Arizona over the state’s new law cracking down on illegal immigrants.

Brewer will be in Washington to meet with other governors. She said Friday that she had asked to meet with Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to discuss border security and immigration. But Obama’s schedule “doesn’t allow for a meeting” with her, White House spokesman Adam Abrams said, adding that the president “does intend to sit down with the governor in the future.”

When Obama returns from his Chicago vacation on Tuesday, he will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Peru President Alan Garcia at the White House. On Wednesday, Obama is meeting with Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, before heading to an event in Pittsburgh and hosting a concert at the White House to honor Paul McCartney.

On Thursday, Obama will speak at Secretary Clinton’s reception for a new partnership between U.S. and India. On Friday, the president will welcome the Major League Soccer men’s championship team, Real Salt Lake, to the White House.

The apparent snub comes after Justice Department officials told Arizona’s attorney general and aides to the governor Friday that the federal government has serious reservations about the state’s new immigration law. They responded that a lawsuit against the state isn’t the answer.

“I told them we need solutions from Washington, not more lawsuits,” said Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat.
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In the wake of the “scandal” of Rand Paul’s unwavering support of property rights, the corporate media has fired another salvo from its trebuchet. Now it insinuates that Rand Paul is a racist because he is opposed to the government granting citizenship to anchor babies.“U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul is stirring it up again, this time by saying he opposes citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are illegal immigrants,” reports the Associated Press. “Paul, who a week ago won the GOP primary, told a Russian TV station in a clip circulating on political Web sites Friday that he wants to block citizenship to those children.”

Often called “maternal tourism,” the anchor baby phenomenon is allowed under federal law. For illegal immigrants, having a child born in the U.S. becomes the Golden Ticket to staying in the country. Anchor babies become eligible to sponsor for legal immigration most of their relatives, including their illegal-alien mothers, when they turn 21 years of age, thus becoming the U.S. “anchor” for an extended immigrant family, notes Andy Selepak of Accuracy in Media.

The Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated in 2007 there were between 287,000 and 363,000 children born to illegal aliens each year. These numbers are based on the crude birth rate of the total foreign-born population (33 births per 1,000) and official estimates of the size of the illegal alien population–between 8.7 and 11. Others put these numbers even higher, explains Selepak. When using the higher estimate of 20 million illegal immigrants and FAIR’s 33 births per 1,000, the higher estimate would roughly double FAIR’s figure to approximately 574,000 to 726,000 anchor babies born in the U.S. each year.

“I’m not opposed to letting people come in and work and labor in our country,” Paul told Russia Today. “But I think what we should do is we shouldn’t provide an easy route to citizenship. A lot of this is about demographics. If you look at new immigrants from Mexico, they register three to one Democrat, so the Democratic Party is for easy citizenship and allowing them to vote. I think we need to address that.”

The Associated Press attempted to get Paul to do a flip-flop on his comments. But his campaign chairman David Adams said Friday that Paul stands behind his statements. “Illegal immigration is a real problem in this country,” Adams said, “and if we can’t talk about this, what can we talk about?”

Jurors who had just convicted a gang member of murdering a 16-year-old boy were confronted outside the Riverside courthouse Thursday by the defendant’s angry relatives, who shouted threats and punched one juror, sheriff’s officials said.

Two family members and a friend of the defendant were arrested. The juror who was hit, a 47-year-old man, did not require medical attention.

Thomas Cahraman, presiding judge of Riverside County Superior Court, said Friday that the attack is under investigation and that juror security will be stepped up.

He said people should not be fearful about serving as jurors. The judge said he could not recall another physical confrontation between jurors and a defendant’s family in his 33 years at the court.

“The fact that it’s rare does not take away from the fact that it happened, and we’ll be devoting resources to see it never happens again,” Cahraman said.

The jurors had found Andres Muñoz guilty of first-degree murder for the 2006 shooting of Derek Ochoa, 16, in a case involving gang rivalry in Riverside’s La Sierra neighborhood.

Joaquina Munoz, left, and Arely Munoz, center, were arrested on suspicion of accosting jurors who had just convicted Andres Munoz, right, of murder
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The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment — even if the job was obtained through forged or stolen documents.

Sen. John Ensign (R, Nev.)

“There was a felony they were committing, and now they can’t be prosecuted. That sounds like amnesty to me,” said Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who offered the amendment yesterday to strip out those provisions of the immigration reform bill. “It just boggles the mind how people could be against this amendment.”

The Ensign amendment was defeated on a 50-49 vote.

“We all know that millions of undocumented immigrants pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for years and sometimes decades while they work to contribute to our economy,” said Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican.

“The Ensign amendment would undermine the work of these people by preventing lawfully present immigrant workers from claiming Social Security benefits that they earned before they were authorized to work in our community,” he said. “If this amendment were enacted, the nest egg that these immigrants have worked hard for would be taken from them and their families.”

Mr. Ensign was among 44 Republicans and five Democrats who voted to block such payouts.

“It makes no sense to reward millions of illegal immigrants for criminal behavior while our Social Security system is already in crisis,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican. “Why in the world would we endorse this criminal activity with federal benefits? The Senate missed a big opportunity to improve this bill, and I doubt American seniors will be pleased with the result.”

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, said it would be unfair to deny illegals the benefits.

“We should not steal their funds or empty their Social Security accounts,” he said. “That is not fair. It does not reward their hard work or their financial contributions. It violates the trust that underlies the Social Security Trust Fund.”

Within hours, the vote had become an issue in this fall’s elections, raised by a Republican challenger to Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Michigan Democrat.
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Since America became a nation, four of her greatest generals have served two terms as president: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant and Dwight David Eisenhower.

Not one of these generals led America into a new war.

Washington was heroic in keeping the young republic out of the wars that erupted in Europe after the French Revolution, as were his successors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Jackson, arguably America’s greatest soldier—who won the Battle of New Orleans, which preserved the Union, and virtually annexed Florida—resisted until his final days in office recognizing the Republic of Texas, liberated by his great friend and subaltern Sam Houston.

Jackson wanted no war with Mexico.

Eisenhower came to office determined to end the war in Korea. In six months, he succeeded—and kept America out of the raging war in Indochina.

Of the men who led us into our 19th century wars—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War—only one, William McKinley, was a soldier who had seen combat.

McKinley had enlisted at 17. In 1862, he was with the Union army at Antietam, the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil.

Though derided as having “the backbone of a chocolate eclair” by the bellicose Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley confided to a friend before going to war with Spain: “I have been through one war. … I have seen the dead piled up. I do not want to see another.”

James Madison, who took us into the War of 1812, which came close to tearing apart the Union; James Polk, who took us to war with Mexico and gave us Texas to the Rio Grande, the Southwest and California; and Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation in its bloodiest war, were politicians. Lincoln had served three months in the Illinois Militia in the Black Hawk War, but he never saw action.

America was led into the world wars by Woodrow Wilson, a professor, and Franklin Roosevelt, a politician. Harry Truman, who took us into Korea, had captained an artillery battery in France in 1918. John F. Kennedy, who led us into Vietnam, had served on a PT boat in the Solomons. George H.W. Bush, who launched Desert Storm, was one of the youngest Navy pilots to fight in the Pacific war.

While Americans this Memorial Day put flags out for all of their war dead, the arguments do not cease over the wisdom of the wars in which they fought and died.

In the grammar and high schools we attended in the 1940s and early 1950s, they were all good wars, all just wars, all necessary wars. Perhaps that is how it should be taught to America’s children.

Yet, if the Revolution was a great and good cause, men fighting for freedom and nationhood, the War of 1812, where we were a de facto ally of Napoleon, seems a less noble endeavor. For among our motives was seizing Canada while the Mother Country was diverted.

Though deplored today, the Mexican War was not an unjust war.

Far from stealing Mexican territory after our victory, we paid for it, and the Mexicans, five years later, agreed to the Gadsden Purchase and offered to sell us Baja California. The greed was in Mexico City.

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