ICE targets Santa Ana California

Interesting that ICE picks the day of the country's financial hurricane to make it's latest move.
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More Than 1,100 Arrested in Cal Immigration Sweep

The Associated Press/Washington Post
Monday, September 29, 2008; 2:28 PM

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Federal immigration authorities say more than 1,150 people have been arrested in a special three-week sweep in California.

The sweep targeted those who ignored deportation orders or returned to the U.S. illegally after being deported.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Monday that more than 400 of those arrested were from Los Angeles and several Southern California counties.

ICE teams from San Francisco and San Diego also participated in the sweep, which concluded Saturday.
© 2008 The Associated Press

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092901474_pf.html
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Federal agents target those who ignored deportation orders or returned to the U.S. illegally. More than 400 are arrested in the Los Angeles area.
By Francisco Vara-Orta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 30, 2008

link to video

Federal immigration agents arrested more than 1,150 people in the largest collective sweep by specialized enforcement teams in California, authorities said today.

The sweep targeted those who ignored deportation orders or returned to the United States illegally after being deported, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

The raids, which ended Saturday, produced 436 arrests in the San Francisco area, 420 in the Los Angeles area and 301 in the San Diego area.

Of the 1,157 illegal immigrants arrested statewide, 595 had outstanding deportation orders and 346 had prior criminal convictions, Kice said. Those arrested come from 34 countries.

The squads responsible for the arrests, known as fugitive operations teams, were developed in 2003 to focus on apprehending foreign nationals who have ignored final orders of deportation or have returned to the U.S. illegally, Kice said.

The most prominent cases involve those wanted or convicted in violent or drug crimes, agency officials said.

"Individuals who defy immigration court orders to leave the country need to understand there are consequences for willfully disregarding the law," said Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Julie L. Myers, who oversees the federal immigration agency.

One L.A.-area case involved Jose Avila, 41, a Mexican national whose criminal history includes convictions for lewd acts involving a child and for battery. He was arrested Sept. 15 in Santa Fe Springs. After he is released by local authorities, Avila will be returned to federal custody for prosecution on felony charges of reentering the country after his deportation last year.

francisco.varaorta@ latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/immigration/la-me-raids30-2008sep30,0,4947494.story

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Human papillomavirus vaccination requirement for immigrants raises concerns

This is about money not about the safety of immigrants and US residents. This article talks discussed that issue of requiring immunization against Human Papilloma Virus for female immigrants seeking permanent residence. Not only has the cost of the vaccine increased tremendously it has had lots of controversy regarding its use.
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Human papillomavirus vaccination requirement for immigrants raises concerns
08:00 PM CDT on Saturday,
September 27, 2008
By THALIA I. LONGORIA
Al Día mailto:tlongoria@aldiatx.com

Federal immigration authorities now require immunization against humanpapillomavirus for female immigrants ages 11 to 26 who are seekingpermanent residence.The mandate by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services went intoeffect July 1, but advocacy groups were largely left in the dark aboutthe new requirements, said Priscilla Huang, Reproductive JusticeProject director and women's law fellow at the National Asian PacificAmerican Women's Forum.The vaccine cost tacks on about $375 to the status change fee of$1,410. It is also gender specific and the only vaccine for a sexuallytransmitted disease, leading some women's rights groups to believe themandate is discriminatory.The vaccine has been controversial since it was introduced to markettwo years ago. In February 2007, Gov. Rick Perry wanted to make theshot mandatory for all sixth-grade girls in Texas. The executive orderwa s shot down.Maria Elena Garcia-Upson, spokeswoman for Citizenship and ImmigrationServices in Dallas, said the vaccines are in no way meant deny ordeter people from the application process.She said Citizenship and Immigration Services is simply followingrecommendations given by the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention. There is funding for the vaccine through the CDC'sVaccines for Children program, but adult women may find it harder topay for the shots."I think the public would agree that people who are coming into thiscountry to adjust their status, if they have a contagious disease, wedon't want that disease to be spread around," Ms. Garcia-Upson said.Ana Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal JusticeCoalition, said the cost of the vaccine will be another barrier forwomen seeking legal status. She said that application fees forimmigrants have recently risen."What we have noticed is that applying for citizenship decreases asthe fees go up," she said. "I don't think it's a coincidence thatthey're pushing for a policy that would provide a burden on immigrants."Jennifer Ng'andu, associate director of health policy at the NationalCouncil of La Raza, said the mandate is of concern."There are benefits to the vaccine, and we're not trying to downplaythem, but this vaccine is not accompanied by education, and they'reonly going to be requiring this for one group of people," she said."It's outrageous."

To view the complete article click here.

Alabama state board of edcuation votes with disgrace...

what a disgrace...not even half of the board members were there to vote. Education is denied once again to students the state has invested in and desire to give back to their communities. Although one board member tried to have more discussion on the proposal it was ignored. Have you noticed that most of the anti-immigrant sentiment is based in the South region region of the US...humm I wonder why?
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AL: Board Bars Illegal Immigrants from Junior Colleges
The Associated Press, September 25, 2008
By Desiree Hunter Pell City,

AL (AP) -- The state board of education passed a new policy denying illegal immigrants admission to Alabama's two-year colleges on Thursday despite one board member's calls to delay it for more discussion and four of the nine members being absent. The policy, which takes effect next spring, was passed on a 4-0 vote, with Ethel Hall of Fairfield abstaining. Four board members David Byers of Birmingham, Ella Bell of Montgomery, Sandra Ray of Tuscaloosa and Gov. Bob Riley were not at the meeting, which was held in Pell City. Hall said she was hesitant to vote because there was only a brief discussion when the policy was first presented to the board at a work session two weeks ago. 'I don't think we've done the kind of research we need to do in order to approve the policy,' she said before describing how her brushes with racial discrimination such as being denied admission to the University of Alabama despite extensive qualifications added to her reluctance. She later taught at the school for seven years. 'It's very, very, dear to me because I have been one of those who have been excluded and I was certainly capable and an American-born citizen,' Hall said. 'So I cannot support this policy until I am given additional information.' Starting next spring, applicants to the community college system will be required to show an Alabama driver's license, state ID card, an unexpired U.S. passport, or an unexpired U.S. permanent resident card. Two secondary forms of documentation, including a photo ID card and a Certificate of Naturalization, will also be accepted. All international applicants must provide a US VISA and an official translated copy of their high school/college transcript along with information such as exam scores and proof of adequate financial support. Shay Farley, attorney and spokeswoman for the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, addressed the board during a public comment period, questioning the policy's necessity and cautioning that there could be unintended consequences. 'We are bound by federal law to provide education to any student, K-12, regardless of legal status,' she said. 'A lot of children are brought by their parents they did not choose to come here. If we deny them a two-year college education, where will they go for their education?' Two-year Chancellor Bradley Byrne said he was willing to work with opponents as the system develops guidelines for implementing the policy. 'I don't think we can address all of their concerns, but I think we can address some of them,' he said. Byrne said there was no way to know for sure how many students would be affected or how much money the policy would save, but he did not think there were a lot of illegal immigrants enrolling at two-year colleges based on student population. Admissions personnel at each college will check the documents, he said. 'For 90 percent or more of our students, all that's going to mean is they give them their driver's license,' he said. Schools in a few other states have passed a similar policy but it's not a big movement, said Raul Gonzalez, director of legislative affairs for the National Council of La Raza advocacy group. Still, Alabama's actions are troubling, he said. 'They need to make sure in their zeal to deny public higher education to undocumented immigrants that they may deny those services to U.S. citizens who don't have documentation,' he said. Gonzalez acknowledged that the documents the system would soon require are the same needed in order to obtain legal employment, but said officials should also be realistic. 'That's a good point, but that's another reason why we need to look at immigration reform,' he said. 'The bottom line is people will find jobs. How many people do you know who are working under the table? It's not about immigration, it's about poor people who need jobs.'

Opinion on California DREAM Act

CA: Opinion: Immigrant Students Deserve Chance at Financial Aid
San Jose Mercury News,
September 25, 2008
By Kent Wong Special

This week the California Dream Act moved to the governor's desk, and the future of thousands of students depends on his decision. The Dream Act would provide undocumented immigrant students the opportunity to compete for college loans and grants for which they are currently ineligible. It is supported by a broad coalition, including educators, students, religious leaders, labor and business groups.SB 1301, sponsored by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, would allow deserving undocumented immigrant students the same opportunity as other students to apply for institutional financial aid. It would be a godsend for these students, and it would benefit society as a whole by increasing the number of educated young people entering the workforce.More than 25,000 undocumented students graduate from California high schools each year. Most were brought here as young children by parents or other relatives. For many, this is the only country they have ever known. And yet, because of their immigration status, they are doomed to a life in the underground economy unless there is a change in federal law that would provide them with a path to citizenship.The Federal Dream Act would offer them an opportunity to earn legal status through attending college or serving in the U.S. military. Despite extensive bipartisan support, the bill was blocked by a minority of senators last year. Members of Congress from both parties are planning to reintroduce the Federal Dream Act in 2009. But in the meantime, California has an opportunity to do the right thing and help young residents in this position.By signing SB 1301 into law, Arnold Schwarzenegger our immigrant governor can make a strong statement that these young people deserve better. They have done exactly what our society has asked them to do. They have worked hard, studied hard and are pursuing a college education.Allowing them to compete for financial aid would not result in any increase to the state budget; nor would it give these students a free ride or unfair advantage over citizens. SB 1301 would just allow them to compete for aid based on their personal knowledge and achievements. Ironically, undocumented students enrolled in higher education pay fees that contribute to the financial aid that is made available to their classmates, yet they themselves cannot apply for these benefits.Undocumented students are allowed to pay in-state tuition because of legislation signed in 2001, opening college doors to thousands who would never have been able to afford out-of-state tuition. Yet even this modest initiative is being attacked in the courts by anti-immigrant forces. Recently, an appeals court issued a ruling against the law.These AB 540 students, as they are called, represent some of the best and brightest of their generation. Despite tremendous obstacles, many are working two and three jobs in order to support themselves through college. They are training to become teachers, social workers, engineers, scientists and health care professionals. These are professions our society desperately needs: U.S. employers are aggressively recruiting thousands of workers from other countries to fill many of these kinds of jobs, when we have a wealth of resources right here that are being ignored.The California Dream Act is good public policy. Not only would immigrant students benefit, but all of California would benefit from a better educated and better skilled workforce. Gov. Schwarzenegger should allow these students a chance at the American dream.Kent Wong teaches labor studies and Asian-American studies at UCLA and has co-edited the student publication, "Underground Undergrads: UCLA undocumented immigrant students speak out."

California DREAM Act may pass today...

This is great news. Kudos to BAMN and other organizations for protesting, although it could've attracted bad attention since the Gov. only had two days to act and if he doesn't act, it will become law come Sep. 3oth. I'm not sure what the latest update is but I hope is what DREAMers in Cali have been waiting for.
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Students march for DREAM Act
By Kate Murti The Politico (Washington, DC),
September 29, 2008

Protesters from around California marched in Sacramento Friday to encourage Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign legislation that would allow undocumented immigrant college students to be eligible for financial aid.
Nearly 2,000 people gathered for the protest, including around 100 students from UC Berkeley and Berkeley High School, according to Ronald Cruz, a UC Berkeley law student and an organizer for By Any Means Necessary, a political organization that has taken special interest in the California Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act.
The organization funded two charter buses to help shuttle student protesters to Sacramento.
'What we showed is that the movement is very strong and nothing but full freedom and equal treatment will stop this movement,' Cruz said. 'What's clear is that there's a lot of optimism that we really felt at the rally, that our mission can turn the corner at any time and definitely that if we don't win the DREAM Act this year, we will very soon.'
Schwarzenegger's deadline to sign or veto the DREAM Act, is Sept. 30. The act would allow undocumented students to receive financial aid administered by California Community Colleges, California State Universities and the University of California.
While Schwarzenegger has not yet made a decision on the recent act, he vetoed an earlier version of the bill in 2006.
'He has over 700 bills to act on,' said Francisco Castillo, a spokesperson for the governor. 'Every other bill that has not been acted on by Sept. 30 will become law and he has not yet taken a position on this bill.'
The bill, authored by Sen. Gilbert Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, was passed by the legislature in September 2007.

To view the complete article click here.

Post IKE: More bodies found

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Grisly finds put Houston-area Ike death toll at 32
2 bodies found along Galveston shore, another in Orange County
By DANE SCHILLER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 30, 2008, 12:19AM

The Houston-area death toll from Hurricane Ike has reached 32 with the discovery this weekend of two unidentified bodies along the shore in Galveston County and the body of a Port Neches man found in Orange County.

Meanwhile, 40 people who went missing during Hurricane Ike have been reported found, according to dozens of calls received by Laura Recovery Center's hot line. However, the hot line also received about 16 new cases, leaving its count of storm-related missing persons at 365, according to an estimate from Bob Walcutt, executive director.

Walcutt said privacy laws that keep hospitals and shelters from confirming the location of evacuees and patients have kept many families apart.

"Because of that, we've got people who are desperately looking for loved ones who are safe in shelters," he said.

Walcutt said he hoped the list of missing will be pared down significantly in the next week or two to those who "really are missing."

His current list includes many elderly people and at least 26 children. Most of the missing live in Galveston County, more than 50 from the Bolivar Peninsula alone.

Chambers County officials, meanwhile, are awaiting reinforcements to help continue the search of miles of debris washed six miles inland by Hurricane Ike. Searchers have been picking through Bolivar's wreckage for any signs of people who have been reported missing.

"The state has promised to send us as many workers as we need from Task Force One to do the job," said Chambers County Judge Jimmy Sylvia. Until taking a break this past weekend, an exhausted band of eight sheriff's deputies, state game wardens and national refuge workers had been conducting daily searches.

Rescue attempt delayed

The three bodies found this weekend include that of a Port Neches man who had been missing since he called 911 when Hurricane Ike made landfall, authorities said.

Texas EquuSearch volunteers discovered Greg Walker's body Sunday about a mile from where his truck was found, said Lt. J. LeBoeuf of the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

Walker called in distress early Sept. 13, but no rescue attempt could be launched until the next day, LeBoeuf said.

"The wind was too high, and water was still white-capping," he said.

Walker, 40, was married with three children. Port Neches is southeast of Beaumont in Jefferson County.
Tim Miller, of Texas Equu-

Search, said his volunteers had spent four days in Orange County searching for Walker. A friend of Walker's spotted his body Sunday, Miller said.

The two unidentified bodies, both found Saturday in Galveston County, are greatly decomposed, but authorities hoped to find more clues to their identities during autopsies conducted Monday. Results were not immediately available.

A fisherman discovered the body of a person believed to be a Caucasian male about 3:15 p.m. Saturday on the rocks two miles west of an area known as Severs Cut. The other body, believed to be a Caucasian female, was spotted in a debris pile about three hours later by all-terrain vehicle riders on the northwest side of Pelican Island, about 300 yards from Pelican Cut.
"The more people that are out and about going places, the more likely they are to find folks," said D.J. Florence, chief investigator at the Galveston County Medical Examiner's Office.

The weekend discoveries bring the total number of deaths nationwide from Hurricane Ike to 67, according to The Associated Press. The 600-mile-wide storm caused flooding as far north as Illinois.

Searching for remains

State game wardens and other law-enforcement officers have shifted from looking for survivors to finding the remains of the deceased, said Aaron Reed, a spokesman for Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife.

"Our expectation is there are certainly more storm victims to be found," he said. "Whether we are able to find them, I don't know."

Aerial spraying has begun to fend off massive numbers of mosquitoes that make search options almost impossible.

"A great deal of debris was washing out to sea, and some of the missing may never be found, unfortunately," Reed said.

Capt. Rod Ousley, also of the parks department, is overseeing search efforts in an enormous coastal area that runs from the Louisiana state line to the Harris County line.

"In this deal, we've tried by airboat, four-wheeler, four-wheel-drive truck and helicopter, and we're just going to keep trying," he said.

Staff writers Lise Olsen, Rosanna Ruiz and Cindy Horswell contributed to this report.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6031153.html
dane.schiller@chron.com

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Bilingualism -- only an issue in the U.S. - Part I

The argument about bilingualism is only a big deal around here because the other language we are talking about is Spanish. If it was French it would be a different story.

Did you know that the Department of Homeland Security offers a special pass (if you are able to get security clearance) - the pass lets you go through security check points very quickly. The web page of course is in English, it offers the form in one other language, French!

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September 28, 2008, 7:57 pm
The Bilingual Debate: English Immersion

By Lance T. Izumi
Series logo

In this installment of Education Watch, Bruce Fuller and Lance T. Izumi discuss the candidates’ positions on bilingual education. Go to Mr. Fuller’s post.

Lance T. Izumi, a senior fellow in California studies and the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, is the co-author of the book “Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice.” (Full biography.)

Making effective appeals to Hispanic voters is a tricky business. Barack Obama’s education proposals are a case in point.

Mr. Obama’s campaign notes that, “African-American and Latino students are significantly less likely to graduate than white students,” which is true. To combat such achievement gaps, Mr. Obama’s education plan specifically advocates, among other things, “transitional bilingual education” for English-learners. Yet, the question for Mr. Obama is whether his commitment to bilingual education, which emphasizes classroom instruction in languages other than English, overrides his interest in closing achievement gaps.

Take, for example, Sixth Street Prep, a charter elementary school in eastern Los Angeles County. The school’s students are overwhelmingly Hispanic and low income. More than a third of the students, many of whom are recent arrivals, are learning English. Yet, among fourth graders, an astounding 100 percent of the students tested at the proficient level on the 2008 state math exam. A nearly equally amazing 93 percent of fourth graders tested proficient on the state English-language-arts exam. This incredible success was achieved using a different ingredient than the one favored by Mr. Obama.

Sixth Street emphasizes review and practice, constant assessment of skills and a no-excuses attitude. Furthermore, and here’s where Mr. Obama should take note, according to Linda Mikels, Sixth Street’s principal, the school’s instructional approach for English learners is “full immersion.” English immersion emphasizes the near-exclusive use of English in content instruction. Ms. Mikels, who opposes bilingual education, told me, “we’ve had tremendous success with having a student who is brand new from Mexico and you would walk into a classroom 12 months later and you wouldn’t be able to pick out which one he was.” “It’s working,” she observed, “it’s working for us.”

Would Mr. Obama hold up a school like Sixth Street Prep as one model for replication by other schools with large Hispanic and English-learner populations? The school’s achievement results should make the answer to that question a no-brainer, but the education politics within his own party (the National Education Associations has been a long-time supporter of bilingual education) and his own consistent support for bilingual education obscure predicting Mr. Obama’s response.

While he agrees that immigrants should learn English, Mr. Obama recently trivialized the issue when he said that people should stop worrying about “English-only” legislation. Instead, he said, “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.”

If Mr. Obama truly wishes to close achievement gaps, he should carefully consider education models that work rather than scorn or trivialize them.

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Bilingualism- only an issue in the U.S. - Part II

Comments from NYT article on bilingualism.

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It would be interesting to find out how classes are taught in Switzerland, which is tri-lingual.

— Posted by John

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Our maid had a child within two months of my wife delivering our own second child. Five years later, we managed to get our maid’s child into the same public school to which our child went. But she got kicked out for misbehaving and sent to a local school near where our maid lived. Unfortunately, this was a school that mandated that Spanish to be used to teach the students. 13 years later, our child was headed to an elite college and our maid’s daughter was barely able to finish high school. Do I think that our son was brilliant and our maid’s daughter was stupid? No. But it’s very interesting that our maid’s daughter spoke English with a Spanish accent even though she was born and reared 100% in this country. I think back to the day a decade earlier that our maid cried to us that they were teaching her child in Spanish and that she wanted her to learn English in school so that she could do well in this country. To my limited experience, therefore, it’s a really bad idea to teach students who need to work and compete in English to depend upon Spanish.

— Posted by Gary
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Speaking as someone who has taught ESL, using very different models in different high schools with different clientele, I am struck by how much the debate about the quantity of English in the class quickly devolves from a sensible search for the best strategy to an ideological war that produces some very silly teaching strategies. With a little common sense, we can quickly dispatch with some of the silliest of these extremes. For example, using the student’s second language when they first arrive makes sense only if the teacher has a homogeneous group and a basic grasp of the languages students bring into the room. I speak Spanish, and when I had a room full of Spanish speakers, I could use Spanish words to compare true and false cognates, to explain which rules are similar and which are different, etc. But when my classes were filled with students who spoke Chinese (I can hardly manage please and thank you without messing up the tones) this strategy was beyond me. Some folks worry that the use of any of the student’s first language is somehow unpatriotic or counter productive. To these folks I’d say, if you went to another country where you didn’t speak the language, as much as you’d want the instruction to center around the new language and move you to a conversational level, you’d certainly hope the initial instructions could be provided in your language, and that you could ask questions, in English, about how to express certain ideas. Those who favor the use of full bilingual teaching often seem to imply that the English-only folks are disrespectful or even downright racist. Though some of the people who espouse these views outside of education may be just that, people who have dedicated their lives to teaching kids (probably, hopefully) aren’t trying to hurt them because of some external political agenda. Because every class of students is different, and because every teacher’s grasp of foreign languages is different, I’m very glad to see that Senator Obama isn’t the type to jump on one example and try to force it on other schools. We teachers don;t benefit from that kind of armchair quarterbacking, and our kids certainly don’t, either. Instead, he’s voiced the principles that all ESL teachers should hold: Teach every child English, and do it in the way that works the best for that child. It’s not racist or evil to admit that our kids will need to be fully fluent in English to be successful in our society, and it’s not unpatriotic to admit that sometimes it can be helpful to use a little of the student’s first language to make that happen.

— Posted by Ben Gorman
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Just one more thought to add: As someone who predominantly teaches literature to native speakers now, it will be very helpful to have a President Obama who shows my students just what a mastery of the English language can sound like, instead of someone like our current president, who shows them that they can butcher the language (and get mostly C’s in school), but if they have a father who is president and lack a conscience, they can still manage to become president, albeit to disastrous effect. I encourage you all to consider what it has been like, over the last seven years, to try to impart the simple values that education matters, that grammar matters, that using real words matters to high school students who see Dubya on the news each night.

— Posted by Ben Gorman
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I 100% agree on your belief in the power of English immersion. That faith is based on my personal experience as an exchange student in France, the experience of my daughter as an exchange student in France, and the experience of a number of primarily Asian foreign exchange students who have lived with my family here in America over the years. One school year is enough time to become fluent in an immersion setting. This is especially true for young children who have the greatest facility in learning a new language.

— Posted by ANC


Obama’s not trivializing educational models. Reading the linked article, it’s clear that he was discussing isolationism, not pedagogical philosophy.

The elephant in the room is that most of the arguments for English-only education come not from education experts, but from jingoist laymen. Obama was trying to point out the dangers of that outlook; the world is shrinking rapidly, and kids (and adults) really are at an advantage when they can read and speak more than one language.

While the success of Sixth Street’s program is impressive, as a lay-reader of this article I wonder if there is sufficient evidence that English-only is the cause of their success. I’d be interested to read further research from education experts. (I.e., actual peer reviewed research, not politically motivated pronouncements from people or organizations with an agenda.) If it does turn out that English-only is the path to educational success, then that point needs to be clearly made and not mixed up with positions on isolationism and jingoism.

— Posted by Hopskotch
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Greetings from a bilingualism researcher in Japan. Bilingual education is a field that should never be politicized, first of all. The bilingualism discipine has an established body of research and theory that proves elusive to sound bites, because the common sense of a given society is insufficient, and rigorous scientific analysis is necessary. Even when academics from other fields enter the debate, the gaps in their understanding are apparent, and it becomes a choice of which values are agreeable. For example, the use of the fine-sounding “immersion” in both articles should be corrected to “submersion,” which more realistically portrays what the learner experiences. “Immersion” in the bilingual education field always means that language majority students, like Japanese speakers in Japan or native English speakers in the U.S., learn regular school subjects 50% or more in a foreign language. There is no danger of majority students losing native language proficiency and being thus submerged, drowning in the unfamiliar, or losing linguistic ties with their families. One charter school cannot be generalized to the more common public school experience. It is true that the school staff members need precisely this correct knowledge of bilingualism that is surrounded by misconceptions and politics. Schools should at least be free to act on their best knowledge and staff abilities. Being against bilingual education is often a politically motivated cutting off of informed choices. Is it not absurd that high school students are struggling to start to learn Spanish and other languages for future international trade and communication while the native languages of immigrants are left to rot along with their cognitive abilities? Sweden manages to teach children in a hundred native languages, and Europeans are generally multilingual, because they prioritize international communication. My half-Japanese younger son was just realizing that a lot of foreigners don’t speak Japanese, and being bilingual in Japanese was another cool thing about his dad. How about the rest of you? There is plenty of unused space in growing and mature brains for multilingualism and multiculturalism if you weed out the propaganda.
(Prof.) Steve McCarty in Osaka

— Posted by Steve McCarty
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I live in Iowa City, about twenty miles away from West Liberty, Iowa. There they have a bilingual school system that starts in kindergarten. They have a large Hispanic population and ten years ago they started a voluntary bilingual program. About 40% of the district starts the program in kindergarten. Not only do the Anglo kids who opt for the program learn both Spanish and English but the Hispanics kids learn proper Spanish, not street Spanish. The voluntary program continues to expand.

— Posted by tim
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America is more isolated in the world than she should be, because of the lack of proficiency in a wide range of languages among her citizens. This is ironic given that immigration is the backbone of our nation.

Bilingual education, done properly, will result in students who have a very good mastery of English and who also have academic skills in their native tongue or their parents’. Whether or not their English is as perfect as it would be in a monolingual classroom, I think that there is substantial value in having educated bilinguals in our community, something that gets lost in strictly monolingual classrooms.

— Posted by Greg Shenaut
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Look up look way up, yes that’s Canada up there, and guess what we are Bi lingual. Even if you live in Red Necked Alberta, home of the Calgary Stampede, Yahoo, if you want a trial in French no problem. Canada has spent Billions on making this a priority, to save the French Language is to save the French Culture. Personally I don’t give a s–t about French, but we got it, so if you need help being Bi-lingual, or you just want to study ways we have made teaching a second language to people from all, and I mean, all over the world, check it out.

Lary Waldman

— Posted by Lary Waldman
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23.
September 29th,
2008
10:44 am

If the student who is “brand-new from Mexico” cannot be distinguished from others after 12 months, he or she is probably very adept at accessing peer assistance and hiding what he or she does not know. The difference may not be noticeable to the casual classroom visitor, but for this student academic language competence is years away.

— Posted by Catherine
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Obviously Mr. Izumi hasn’t done his homework. He claims that support for bilingual education has a detrimental effect on English Learners’ academic achievement. He needs to read the report from the esteemed panel of experts convened by the federal government, the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children & Youth (August & Shanahan, 2006). The 12 member panel reviewed 292 scientifically sound research studies over 4 decades that show a clear advantage for English learners who acquire reading skills in their native language, which is accomplished through effective well-implemented bilingual education programs. Prof. Claude Goldenberg of Stanford University quantified the native-language reading advantage, pointing out that bilingual readers have a 12 to 15 percentile point advantage over their English learner peers taught exclusively in English. Izumi either ignores or doesn’t know the research findings on the effectiveness of bilingual instruction, which are among the most robust in educational research. Shame on Mr. Izumi for arguing a position that is totally unsupported by the authoritative educational research. His ignorance of the research findings exposes the ideology rather than the science that drives his opinion about bilingual education. Sen. Obama is right. There is every reason for him to support Latino voters’ rights (and the rights of all parents who want their children to have the bilingual advantage) to establish and choose bilingual education programs.

— Posted by Jill Kerper Mora
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If the goal is to help the child, Dr. Izumi’s proposal is unquestionably best. The history of my country (USA) show Immersion in the local language works far faster and with clearer understanding than teaching in the language of the childs past. Immersion language instruction does however require Teachers with broader training in languages and culture than usually found in most local elementary schools in the USA. Principal Mikels is right on. On this one, Senator Obama is simply wrong.
-XL

— Posted by Axl


Research in the field of applied linguistics shows that English only education is not necessarily the best method for ESL students, despite the success of this method in one instance. Success in the language classroom encompasses far more than simply language proficiency and is determined by factors other than a high score on a test. The goal of any teacher or ESL program should be to foster the overall academic success and well-being of the students. Using an ESL student’s first language in the classroom enhances cognitive development, offers the student the chance to be fully literate in two languages and functionally bi-lingual (which opens many career possibilities for students in the future) and is beneficial for the student’s self-esteem and cultural identity. Academic articles such as “Reexamining English Only in the ESL Classroom” by E. Auerbach or “It’s not my Job” by Oxelson and Lee support the use of the heritage language in the ESL classroom. The success of a teaching method is highly dependent on the dynamic of the classroom. Because each classroom has students of different backgrounds and skill levels, it is impossible and foolish to say that any one method, such as English Only, will be successful for all ESL classrooms.

— Posted by Charlotte Peterson
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My father remembers getting disciplined and shamed for speaking spanish at school; native american children were stolen and beaten when they spoke anything other than english. My father nearly lost his ability to speak spanish and entire generations of children ended up unable to speak to their parents and grandparents.

What people are afraid of is the isolationist and jingoistic tone (thank you Hopskotch) that frequently infiltrates the discussion on bilingualism. I think that kids should learn as many languages as possible. I’m proud of my little cousin who is three but can converse easily in english or spanish. It is important to teach children english BUT we HAVE to be careful that they don’t lose their native language. unfortunately, I don’t ever hear that concern for balance coming from anti-bilingual education folks.

— Posted by Bernardette
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How many Presidents have been bi-lingual? How many member of the congress are bi-lingual?

Now, how many of them were required to study another language in both high school AND college?

I was just in Barcelona, the waiter at this cheap restaurant spoke three languages FLUENTLY.

I have America friends in Germany. Their two kids spoke three languages fluently by age 8: English, German and French. so did the other kids in neighborhood. They also knew some Italian.

John Kerry studied in Switzerland and downplayed his ability to speak another language. Apparently in America that makes one elitist.

Jackie Kennedy, on the other hand, was treated like a demi-goddess because she spoke French!!!! Imagine that? She took French in school and learned it! Isn’t that amazing??!

— Posted by Mark W
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f teaching a child in Spanish makes her a maid, and teaching her in English makes her a lawyer, where to we get our bilingual lawyers for NAFTA cases, international negotiations, etc? I am able to be a historian of Latin America because I learned Spanish in high school. Should the children of Spanish-speaking parents also have to learn Spanish in high school if they want to be scholars or executives or diplomats or travel directors or container-ship captains or alpaca-fleece buyers or high-school Spanish teachers with native accents or any of the huge number of jobs where speaking and writing Spanish and English equally well is very important? Shouldn’t we try to preserve and improve all our immigrant kids’ native language skills as a way of helping connect the US to the rest of the world? I’ve seen this point made already here, and I’m glad.
Are some people really arguing that we should intentionally make kids lose their native language so that their English will be better? That knowing a foreign language is too dangerous for immigrants and should be restricted to the native born? I hope not, but it sounds like they might be.
Does anyone on the pro bilingual side really object to using immersion-style classes for teaching English (as opposed to refusing to give any tutoring or content help in a native language)?
Is there no middle ground? No program in which everything is taught in English, but there’s a class in formal Spanish or French or Hebrew or Portuguese or Cantonese or Korean or whatever foreign languages have enough students to justify the class? No program in which the English classes are designed to prepare students to study, say, history in English after a year, math in English after 2 years, geography in English after 3 years, earth science after 4 years, etc? I have advised college students doing poorly because their English classes hadn’t taught them the words they needed for calculus — I assume something similar happens in grade school, and could be fixed.

— Posted by Sam Martland
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Too much of this discussion is either/or, black and white. I grew up in 4 foreign countries where, each time, and have lots of experience with language learning (and being thrown into new environments without much warning as a child). Immersion is great, but children also need some grounding in their own language. If parents are illiterate themselves or not providing Spanish-language reading material and complex language interactions at home, and the kid is in an immersion program, it will be detrimental to the kid.
Immersion is great for some subjects, but in that case children should also have a class in Spanish-language literature and culture, with practice in writing in Spanish. The non-Hispanics could be in a language-learning class of their own at that time.
I’m fluent in 4 languages, but my comprehension for complex content will always be fastest, easiest, and least effortful in English. If I had had to stop learning in English completely while I was growing up, I would have been an intellectually stunted and discouraged and bored person.

— Posted by cls

Mexican immigrants receive education with funds from Mexico

I had never heard of this program and wonder if they have one here in Houston to maybe volunteer. Education is the path to success and it is a worldwide-right and it should not matter if Mexico is funding programs for Mexicans in the US. Kudos to those who have taken advantage of programs like Plaza Comunitaria which help immigrants graduate with an equivalent of a Mexican high school diploma.

I am mostly surprised this story was written in GA, having seen and felt the anti-immigrant sentiment in Georgia, Columbus is south of Atlanta and close to an Army Infantry training camp where I visited to attend an Army graduation of one of my cousins who is currently completing his 12-month "tour"(that's what he calls it) in Irak.

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Mexico quietly helps emigrants to US learn Spanish

By Laura Wides Munoz

The Ledger Enquirer (Columbus, GA),

September 24, 2008



For more than a decade, as the immigration debate has swelled on both sides of the border, the Mexican government has been quietly providing money, materials and even teachers to American schools, colleges and nonprofit organizations.
The programs aren't substitutes for U.S. curricula, but educators familiar with them say they provide a lifeline for adult students with little formal education by helping them become literate in Spanish - and by extension, English.
Yet many educators are wary of even talking about the programs, fearing they might stoke an anti-immigrant backlash.
The Mexican government, which spends more than $1 million annually on the programs, has many reasons to provide the aid to the immigrants and their children. The programs allow it to give back to the growing number of Mexicans living legally and illegally in the U.S. Behind oil, remittances from these individuals are the second-largest source of foreign income for the Mexican economy - almost $24 billion last year.
'We don't want the Mexicans in the exterior to feel like milk cows being expressed for the resources they were sending back,' said Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, head of the Mexican government's Institute for Mexicans Abroad, which oversees most of the programs.
Mexicans abroad need an education to represent the country well, he said.
'The image and prestige of Mexico is inextricably linked to the image and prestige of these communities in the U.S.,' Gonzalez said.
He also acknowledged that many of the adult participants are likely illegal immigrants, a group the U.S. government doesn't want to allow to stay, let alone have to support.
'Mexican involvement in American public education is another symptom of how things are different than the Ellis Island era,' said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to limit immigration. 'With technology, distance doesn't really matter. You never really leave the old country behind.'
Krikorian said the U.S. shouldn't rely on Mexico to help integrate immigrants.
'Both the public and a lot of lawmakers want immigration on the cheap,' he said. 'Contracting out to the Mexican government is a cop-out.'
Such responses are exactly what educators fear might take the few educational opportunities away from people like Alfredo Ortiz, 43, of Chattanooga, Tenn., who came to the U.S. from the state of Chiapas with a third-grade education in 1992 and began picking cucumbers before becoming a landscaper. For years, he says, he didn't have time to study, but more than that, the thought of re-entering school terrified him.
Then he heard about a new program called 'Plaza Comunitaria,' or Community Plaza, at Chattanooga State Technical College, where he could study Mexican elementary and middle school subjects online, with assistance from volunteers who receive stipends from Mexico. That seemed less daunting than jumping directly into English, and he quickly enrolled.
Much to his surprise, he was soon confident enough to study an hour a night in Spanish and an hour a night in English, earning his middle school diploma from Mexico along the way.
'When I achieved understanding of the Spanish and how to conjugate those verbs, it was so much easier to understand how to conjugate in English,' he said. 'It also sets an example for my kids. They see I struggled, so they should reach even farther.'
Plaza Comunitaria is the Mexican government's biggest educational export program. It began in 2002 in San Diego and now operates at 370 sites in 35 states from Oregon to Florida, providing $1 million in grants. But it's not the only one. Mexico also donates nearly 10,000 Spanish-language school books a year to U.S. academic institutions and community centers, sends more than 100 teachers to the U.S. to teach summer classes and has a pilot program with the University of Texas to help immigrant students receive U.S. credit for classes they took in Mexico, among other programs. Gonzalez said the costs of most of those programs were mostly in-kind and did not have the numbers.
Sonia Jaramillo, who has helped coordinate Plaza Comunitaria programs through California's Monterey County Office of Education, says experiences like Ortiz's are common. Many of her adult students come in for the Mexican classes because they feel more comfortable, but they quickly move on to English, or even courses in parenting and computers.
In western Oregon, the Estacada School District is using the online classes not just for adults but to help immigrant teens keep up with other subjects as they learn English.
'There's all this curriculum online. It's interactive, it's pretty cool, and it's free,' said Joni Tabler, a former ESL teacher turned charter school principal. 'A lot of their curriculum is a lot higher level than what we teach.'
In St. Lucie County, along Florida's eastern coast, public school superintendent Michael Landon said the district was thrilled to receive crates of free textbooks from Mexico. They aren't part of the curriculum, but students can use them while they learn English or Spanish.
Across the state in Clearwater, near Tampa, the Mexican government has paid for several teachers to offer the young children of immigrants summer enrichment classes at a community center. On a hot summer day, the students skipped to the tune of traditional Mexican jigs before learning Spanish stories.
Juan Carlos Baldizar, 10, of Clearwater, was born in the U.S. but has shuttled between the two countries with his parents, both indigenous Mayans. He said the classes are cool because he learns 'new stuff about Mexico,' things his parents tried to tell him but he never really paid attention to, like the Mayan calendar.
Juan Carlos said being able to practice his written Spanish also helped him feel more comfortable at home and at school.
'If your mom was born in Mexico, and like the children are born in the United States, you have to learn two cultures,' he said. 'It's confusing sometimes.'
The Mexican government is not the only foreign government to provide educational assistance in the U.S. France, for instance, has provided resources for years, and Japan offers books and other materials through the Japanese Foundation.
But neither country supplies anywhere near the number of immigrants Mexico sends to the U.S. each year, and their target populations tend to be more affluent and better educated, making them far less likely targets for anti-immigration sentiment.
In St. Lucie, angry e-mails and letters to the editor bombarded the school following reports of the donated Mexican texts after some local media mistakenly reported the books were replacing standard Florida texts. The controversy eventually died down.
Tabler faced a similar backlash in Oregon, at least at first.
'We don't want to get into political issues. We just want to educate kids,' she said. 'And if the curriculum from Mexico is a good tool for us to be successful, then we're going to use it.'

High turnover rates of new Border Patrol agents

WOW! I think that most of the agents there are young and uncertain about what they want from BP. Also they might just realize what a failure the government has been or repent from joining having seen the sensitive side to immigration.


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Patrol The Turnover
Pittsburgh Tribune Review,
September 22, 2008

The disturbingly high turnover rate of new U.S. Border Patrol agents -- about 30 percent of entry-level agents leave within the first 18 months -- suggests the underlying problems are at the highest levels of the government.
The Bush administration deserves credit for trying to fulfill its pledge of increasing the number of agents to 18,000 by the end of the year. That's up from 12,000 two years ago and double from eight years ago. It costs $14,700 to train just one person.
That means 42 percent of agents have been on the job for less than three years, according to The Associated Press.

The overall turnover rate was 10.9 percent since October 2007

Palin and immigration

I completely agree with Professor Hernandez that Gov. Palin is a joke, her interview with Katie Curic was very vague, to view the Blog Governor Palin's Mouth: and no it's not about Lipstick click here. I saw that interview and i was just so upset. She is not qualified. Now, when it comes to immigration, like everything else she will just say what McCain tells her to say. The drastic change of action from amnesty to border security first is what bothers me the most. We must stop this circus.

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Where Does She Stand?

Palin and immigration

By Mark Krikorian

The Washington Times,

September 25, 2008



Gov. Sarah Palin wowed Republicans with her convention speech. In addition to her life story, she expressed strong conservative views on lower taxes, national defense, and energy independence.
But what does she think about immigration? She said nothing about it, no doubt at the behest of the McCain campaign. And there doesn't seem to be anything on the record revealing her views — not on border security, not on legal immigration, nothing. The Hill newspaper quotes an immigration expert in Alaska as saying 'She's never made any statements. I don't recall really any positions that she's taken.'
Given Sen. John McCain's leading role, with Sen. Ted Kennedy, in pushing for amnesty for illegal aliens and increased legal immigration, this missing piece in Mrs. Palin's portrait has some otherwise-enthusiastic voters concerned.
Here are a few things we do know. Alaska has a 1,500-mile border with Canada, but immigration is not a major issue. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that the state has one of the smallest number of illegal immigrants, with fewer than 10,000 as of a few years ago, and one of the slowest growth rates in the illegal population. The total immigrant population isn't much bigger — the Center for Immigration Studies recently estimated that in 2007, there were only 39,000 foreign-born people in Alaska, legal and illegal combined, representing about 6 percent of the state population, less than half the immigrant share in the nation's population as a whole. Despite these small numbers, and despite data from the 2000 Census showing that Filipinos are by far the single biggest immigrant group in Alaska, the number of Mexican immigrants has grown enough that the Mexican government is set to open a Consulate this fall in Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. According to the Congressional Research Service, the legislature in 2003 declared Alaska a sanctuary state, 'prohibiting state agencies from using resources or institutions for the purpose of enforcing federal immigration laws.' Alaska is also one of the few states that gives driver's licenses to illegal aliens.
But since she only became governor last year, and has been battling entrenched politicians and oil companies ever since, and since immigration issues just aren't that politically salient in Alaska in the first place, none of the above really tells us anything about Mrs. Palin's views.
As a seemingly traditionalist conservative, unlike her running mate, there's an expectation that she's hawkish on illegal immigration. And it's possible her lack of a paper-trail on what writer John O'Sullivan calls the 'National Question' — issues surrounding the coherence of our culture and the sovereignty of our Republic, like immigration, border security, bilingual education, and the like - may simply be a function of the normalness of her origins and surroundings: No one she knows wants to deconstruct America through open borders and multiculturalism, so she's never really had to think about it.
Gov. Sarah Palin with Sen. John McCain
It's certain that when pressed on the campaign trail, she will mouth the McCain position on immigration — but which McCain position? After his campaign's near-death experience last year due to his championing the biggest illegal-alien amnesty in American history, Mr. McCain has said he 'got the message' from the American people and now favors border security first (i.e., before moving on to the amnesty). But when pressed, it's abundantly clear he doesn't mean a word of it. Mr. McCain hasn't changed his mind about the need for enforcement so much as he's come to realize that the American people won't give him what he really wants — amnesty and increased immigration — unless he appears serious about enforcement.
This could be where Mrs. Palin comes in. She'd be much more believable selling 'border security first' to voters because she's more likely to actually believe it. But if the Republican ticket does win, Vice President Palin will have a decision to make next year, when Mr. McCain will again try to push through a massive amnesty, whether the border is secure or not. The White House will be tempted to exploit her credibility with the right to try to sell amnesty to conservatives. But given the unprecedented outpouring of opposition to last year's amnesty bill, it would be a serious mistake for her to agree to such a role, as it would undermine her own political viability in the future. Grass-roots enthusiasm about, say, a Palin-Jindal ticket in 2012 would be significantly dampened if she were to vigorously push the position that has caused Mr. McCain the greatest problems within his own party.
Barring a political blunder like this on her part, we probably won't learn Mrs. Palin's real views on immigration until she comes out from Mr. McCain's shadow, either after his loss in November or when she runs to succeed him.

BAD Rules in court for immigrants

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Railroading Immigrants

The Nation

October 6, 2008

by David Bacon

A special Federal District court convenes every day at 1 pm in Tucson. All the benches, even the jury box, are filled with young people whose brown skin, black hair and indigenous features are common in a hundred tiny towns in Oaxaca or Guatemala. Their jeans, T-shirts and cheap tennis shoes show the dirt and wear from the long trek through northern Mexico, three days walking across the desert, and nights sleeping at the immigration detention center on the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Presiding over one court session in June, Judge Jennifer Guerin called these defendants before her in groups of eight. They walked up in tiny waddling steps, heavy chains binding their ankles and wrists to their waists, and sat. Judge Guerin recited a litany of questions, translated into Spanish through headphones. "You've been charged with illegal entry, a criminal offense...at trial you would have the subpoena power of the court...you have certain rights," she intones. At the end she asks anyone who doesn't understand to stand up. No one does. She asks if they plead guilty. After a moment in which her question is translated, seventy voices mumble "Sí."

Leaving the courtroom a young woman stumbles, eyes streaked with tears. A public defender tells the judge her feet are covered with blisters from walking through the wilderness. A boy no older than 13 or 14 searches the room with his eyes as he's led away, perhaps seeking a friend or relative. No one seems older than 30, and most are much younger. They are today's border crossers--the mostly indigenous youth of southern Mexico and Central America...

for complete article:  http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/bacon

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U.S. Activist Marcella Grace Eiler killed in Oaxaca

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from Democracy Now

US Activist Killed and Raped in Mexico

September 29, 2008

In Mexico, police have arrested a man for raping and killing an American activist named Marcella Grace Eiler. She had spent time in Oaxaca as an international human rights observer, photographer, journalist and translator. She was also connected to Arizona Indymedia.

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From Citizen Orange:

Marcella Grace Eiler - A Hero: Pro-Migrant Sanctuary Sphere

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From the Unapologetic Mexican

The Goodness in the World
by nezua. written Sunday, September 28th, 2008 9:41 am

I WANTED TO WRITE TODAY OF MARCELLA GRACE EILER’S LIFE and not of her death. I wanted to talk about how she was young, only 20 years old and already interested in serving as protection for indigenous rights; of how she was from Eugene, Oregon. I wanted to write about what she was doing in Oaxaca and what kinds of things she was interested in, like teaching dance...

for link to complete post from Unapologetic Mexican, click here

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Stephen King (the banker) on the U.S. Financial Crisis

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Stephen King: In Mexico, they've seen it all before. And there are lessons for all of us

Monday, 29 September 2008
Independent.co.uk

On a business trip to Mexico last week, I was talking to some local economists and financial experts. They know a thing or two about financial crises. Mexico, after all, has had more than its fair share of problems over the last 30 years, what with the Latin American debt crisis in the early Eighties and the "Tequila crisis" in the mid-Nineties.

Their view was simple. The US – and, for that matter, parts of Europe – is experiencing the kinds of problems associated with emerging economies. It is easy to see why. The sub-prime market is a market where creditors lend to very risky borrowers, in much the same way as investors have poured money into sometimes risky emerging markets.

The growth of the US sub-prime market, in turn, depended on the increased participation of foreign investors, many of whom snapped up mortgage-backed securities in ever-larger amounts. Judged by its widening current account deficit in recent years, the same is true in the UK, too. Emerging market bubbles, of course, are also associated with heightened foreign interest.

And, as banks and other financial institutions have seen their reputations shredded in recent months, some would argue that crony capitalism – which was rife in parts of Asia in the mid-Nineties in the run-up to the 1997 crisis – has also been widespread in the US. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spent approaching $200m (£108m) lobbying Washington to maintain a regulation-light environment for their mortgage businesses (intriguingly, one of the big recipients of campaign funds from the mortgage giants was Barack Obama).

The similarities, though, aren't just restricted to the experience of emerging economies. Worryingly, the US and UK experiences increasingly resemble Japan's economic and financial progress at the beginning of the 1990s.

It's often forgotten that, at the end of the Eighties, Japan was considered to be something of a miracle economy. Most economists thought Japan's output would be able to grow through the 1990s at a rate of between 3 and 4 per cent a year. With falling equity and land prices and with failing banks, these hopes floundered. As the decade progressed, Japan experienced an unwelcome dose of deflationary reality.

Despite all this historical evidence, there has been an institutionalised denial of financial dangers in the US, the UK and elsewhere in the industrialised world. Whether this reflects arrogance, hubris, feelings of Western "superiority" or plain stupidity, I don't know. What's clear, however, is that the warning signs stemming from the experiences of the emerging markets and of Japan were simply ignored.

At the heart of the problem is an insistence at the macroeconomic level on the pursuit of price stability without any real reference to other signs of economic imbalance. For much of the late Eighties, Japan successfully delivered price stability, yet this achievement didn't prevent Japan from having one of the biggest financial bubbles of all time. The tell-tale signs were there in the form of big increases in equity and land prices, but the Bank of Japan and others chose to ignore them. It was only later on, when equity prices were already falling, that the Bank of Japan really began to fret about inflation and, by that stage, the seeds of future deflation had already been sown. Much the same story applies to many of the Asian countries which succumbed to economic and financial collapse in 1997 and 1998. Before the meltdown, these countries ran budget surpluses. Their inflation rates were low. What could possibly go wrong? As it turned out, many Asian countries had borrowed heavily from abroad, reflected in widening current account deficits. The foreign inflows, in turn, were often invested in madcap property ventures. Sound familiar?

Then there are the similarities with Mexico's bubble in the Nineties. Mexico did well for all sorts of reasons at the beginning of the 1990s but one key source of external support was the advent of very low interest rates in the US, put in place by a Federal Reserve keen to deal with America's early-1990s credit crunch. Low interest rates encouraged capital to leave the US. Some of it ended up in Mexico, adding rocket fuel to the growth rate south of the border. In the end, the Mexican rocket exploded and the economy fell to earth.

Low interest rates have also played a role this time around. Following the collapse in stock prices in 2000 and 2001, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates in response to the economic chill pervading company balance sheets. Having borrowed too much through the Nineties' boom, companies chose to repay debt. The Federal Reserve feared that a sudden increase in corporate saving might throw the US economy into protracted recession. But the consequence of lower US rates was not so much additional borrowing in Mexico but, extra borrowing from US households: at the margin, much of this additional borrowing was of the sub-prime category, providing a link with emerging market crises of old.

Spotting economic and financial bubbles is no easy task. To pretend, though, that bubbles are confined only to emerging markets, is plain folly. They are a persistent feature of capitalism, whether crony or otherwise. Some bubbles might arguably serve a useful purpose – technology-related bubbles, for example, help to steer resources into the most socially-useful areas of economic activity (railways in the mid-19th century, computers in the late 20th century). Others might not cause too much lasting damage, particularly if the authorities are able to clear up the mess in a bubble's aftermath.

Bubbles related to property, though, are almost always bad news. Whereas new technologies can add to the level of well-being, property speculation too often diverts resources away from welfare-enhancing projects towards short-term monetary gain.

Most emerging market crises are violent affairs, associated with savage losses of activity in the first one or two years. That's less likely in the US this time around because of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. Unlike most of the emerging economies, the US borrows from abroad in its own notes and coin. When things go wrong in the US (the housing crisis is currently the biggest single problem) it's initially a bigger challenge for the overseas creditor – who discovers that the domestic value of his dollar assets is beginning to decline – than for the domestic debtor.

But that story only works for a while. As foreign creditors have chosen to steer clear of US assets, so US banks have been left with all manner of toxic waste. The counterparty risk associated with this has been instrumental in explaining why the US financial system is today in such a parlous state, and why the US economy is now threatened with a multi-year period of low growth and high unemployment.

The Paulson plan is, in effect, a taxpayer bailout designed to protect the US banking system from the consequences of foreign aversion towards US assets. It's needed because the US has, for too long, survived through the sale of dodgy assets to unsuspecting foreign creditors. Might the US, then, be the world's largest emerging market in disguise?

Stephen King is managing director of economics at HSBC

©independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-in-mexico-theyve-seen-it-all-before-and-there-are-lessons-for-all-of-us-945378.html
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On S 3594: from the ACLU

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ACLU Applauds Senators Menendez and Kennedy for Bill to Protect U.S. Citizens from Unlawful Detention and Deportation (9/26/2008)

Long-awaited legislation establishes due process standards for immigration detention, raids and deportation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (202) 675-2312 or media@dcaclu.org

WASHINGTON, DC – Last night, Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) introduced legislation to protect U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents from being unlawfully detained and deported by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the wake of sweeping immigration raids that have devastated communities across the country, the ACLU welcomes this bill, S.3594, The Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act, as the first legislation to require DHS to follow due process standards in executing immigration raids.

“The Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act is long overdue,” said Joanne Lin, ACLU Legislative Counsel. In recent years, immigration detention and deportation rates have grown exponentially: last year over 300,000 people were deported and over 30,000 people held in immigration detention daily. DHS’s immigration enforcement actions have been so sweeping and untargeted that they have ensnared U.S. citizens. Hundreds of U.S. citizens have been unlawfully detained by DHS, and at least one U.S. citizen was illegally deported to Mexico, a country he had never lived in. According to Lin, “These gross due process violations have occurred because there are no controls or regulations governing DHS’s conduct. This bill is a necessary antidote to DHS’s unchecked and unconstitutional immigration enforcement powers.”

The ACLU has sued DHS for illegal detaining and deporting people including U.S. citizens. One ACLU client, Pedro Guzman, a U.S. citizen born in California, was deported to Mexico in 2007. After he was deported, Mr. Guzman was forced to live on the streets, to bathe in rivers and to eat out of trash bins for several months before he was allowed to reenter his home country, the U.S. The ACLU of Southern California and the law firm of Morrison & Foerster have brought a damages action against DHS on behalf of Mr. Guzman and his mother.

"Local jail officials and federal immigration officers deported the undeportable, a United States citizen, based on appearance, prejudice and reckless failure to apply fair legal procedures," said ACLU of Southern California Legal Director Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney for Pedro Guzman and his mother. “Local law enforcement officials should do the jobs they're trained for, not enforce complicated federal immigration laws. We don't use local officials to audit IRS returns or conduct foreign wars; that's why we have a federal government. The same applies to enforcement of immigration laws.”

In another lawsuit, the ACLU, National Immigration Law Center and the National Lawyers’ Guild sued DHS for systematically denying access to counsel to workers swept up in an immigration raid. In February 2008, ICE agents descended on the premises of a printer supply company in Van Nuys, California, temporarily shutting down operations. The ACLU and other lawyers offered to represent all the arrested workers, but ICE refused to let the workers consult with immigration attorneys, both at the worksite and later at the local ICE field office in the days following the raid. Some of the workers who tried to assert their right to counsel were intimidated by ICE agents into making incriminating statements.

The ACLU, NILC and NLG had no choice but to sue DHS for violating the workers’ right to consult with immigration counsel. In March 2008, DHS settled the case and allowed immigration attorneys to sit in on the workers’ interviews with ICE officers. The workers were represented by Ahilan Arulanantham, director of immigrants’ rights and national security at the ACLU of Southern California. According to Mr. Arulanantham, “ICE enforcement actions repeatedly violated the Constitution and federal law in this case. U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and others living in this country are entitled to a federal government that follows the law and due process.”

These ACLU lawsuits highlight the urgent need for Congress to pass legislation that curbs ICE’s unconstitutional raids, detention and deportation practices. To this end, this legislation would do the following:

Create due process protections, such as notification of immigration charges and access to counsel and phones, during immigration enforcement efforts;
Require DHS to implement regulations to ensure that immigration detainees are treated humanely;
Promote “alternatives to detention” programs that are more humane and cost-effective than traditional penal-style detention;
Establish an ICE ombudsman to investigate complaints and to create DHS accountability; and
Provide labor protections to ensure that ICE worksite raids do not undermine labor or employment law investigations.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-s3594/show
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Anti-Foreigner Party in Austria gaining power

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Far right surges in Austria vote, instability looms

By Mark Heinrich
Reuters/Washington Post
Monday, September 29, 2008; 4:49 AM

VIENNA (Reuters) - The far right surged to almost a third of the vote in Austria's parliamentary election on Sunday, complicating prospects for the biggest mainstream party, the Social Democrats, to forge a stable coalition government.

The right's record showing heralded political instability in the affluent Alpine republic since the two main centrist parties will be hard put to re-establish a broad coalition even if they resolve the feuds that killed off their last alliance.

"Terrible," political analyst Anton Pelinka said of prospects for stable government in the near future.

"The strength of the far-right parties will make formation of a coalition incredibly difficult if you don't bring either into government," he told Reuters. Social Democrats have ruled out an alliance with the right over its anti-foreigner stances.

Preliminary official results showed the center-left Social Democrats at 30 percent and the conservative Peoples Party at 26 percent, down from 35 and 34 percent respectively in 2006.

It was the worst showing for both since World War Two.

But by retaining their status as the largest single party, the Social Democrats under Werner Faymann are expected to be asked by Austria's president to form the next government.

Heinz-Christian Strache's far right Freedom Party scored 18 percent, compared with 11 percent two years ago, while Joerg Haider's right-wing populist Alliance for Austria's Future was on 11 percent, almost tripling its vote haul in 2006.

The two parties were once one, before an acrimonious split in 2005. A major question now is whether the two might cooperate to bolster the right's case for a share of power.

The ecological Greens slipped to 10 percent from 11 percent.

A throaty roar filled the air in Freedom's election tent in Vienna when the results flashed on a screen, with the crowd -- mainly young and middle-aged men drinking beer -- punching the air and shouting "bravo."

"The Social Democrats and Peoples Party have been punished and rejected. And the Social Democrats will have to make clear why they are not at least ready to go into talks about other coalitions," said Strache, a former dental technician.

Asked by state television how he would proceed, Faymann said: "I stand by our 'no' to a coalition with Freedom or the Alliance. We want a stable government with a broad base..., not a squabbling government, which is what voters rejected."

The results did not include absentee and postal ballots, representing around 10 percent of voters. Final figures are due on October 6 but party rankings are unlikely to change.

RIGHTIST APPEAL GROWS

Freedom and the Alliance lured away voters from both centrist parties by tapping into anger over government gridlock and proposing anti-inflation measures. The right also benefited from two leaders seen as the most engaging by ordinary people.

The two major parties' coalition collapsed in July after 18 months of deadlock that stymied promised economic reforms.

"The biggest winner is collectively the radical right ... but that doesn't mean they can come together in a political partnership," said Richard Luther, an expert on Austria at Keele University in Britain.

"I think a grand coalition (of the two biggest parties) is still the most likely, (but) it would be relatively weak in terms of its legitimacy," said Luther.

Pelinka said the conservatives might go tactically into opposition and wait for the Social Democrats to fail in creating another coalition. "But where would they begin?" he said.

Social Democrats feared any wooing of Freedom, best known for its anti-immigrant and anti-Islam campaigns, would shatter the party. A hook-up with the Greens would be more palatable, but not command a majority in parliament.

"This isn't a national catastrophe, it doesn't mean that Austria is a right-wing country. We knew this was coming," said Michel Palliardi, 33, who voted for the Social Democrats.

"A lot of this was in protest at the (outgoing) government. There is a sense of mistrust."

Freedom's first junior role in government so repelled the EU in 2000 that it briefly imposed sanctions on Austria. Strache wants to be interior minister and put a stop to immigration.

(additional reporting by Boris Groendahl and Sylvia Westall)

(Editing by Giles Elgood)
© 2008 Reuters

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092900376.html

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Governor Palin's Mouth: and no, it isn't about lipstick

Maybe I should be focusing on the financial bailout.  But Sarah Palin just keeps getting my attention.  She puts all American females to shame.  What were McCain and Co. thinking?  I know they were pressured by the Religious Right - but why go to such an extreme? In terms of the Couric interview,  my undergraduates would have come up with much more coherent answers.

The truth is, Obama is more educated and aware of the world around him.  Yet, I just don't know if anyone will really help - after watching the presidential debate on Friday (September 26th) I am totally convinced our political campaigning has turned into a charade.

What we really need to do is be much more careful about how we choose our Congressmen and Senators.  Our current president may be lacking in intelligence, but it has been the Congress that has let us down repeatedly these past 8 years.  

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Palin is Ready! Please:  McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, that is simply not true.
Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008

Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony? Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that wonderful phrase in American politics, "to spend more time with her family"? Having stayed in purdah for weeks, she finally agreed to a third interview. CBS's Katie Couric questioned her in her trademark sympathetic style. It didn't help. When asked how living in the state closest to Russia gave her foreign-policy experience, Palin responded thus:

"It's very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America. Where—where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to—to our state."

There is, of course, the sheer absurdity of the premise. Two weeks ago I flew to Tokyo, crossing over the North Pole. Does that make me an expert on Santa Claus? (Thanks, Jon Stewart.) But even beyond that, read the rest of her response. "It is from Alaska that we send out those …" What does this mean? This is not an isolated example. Palin has been given a set of talking points by campaign advisers, simple ideological mantras that she repeats and repeats as long as she can. ("We mustn't blink.") But if forced off those rehearsed lines, what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish.

Couric asked her a smart question about the proposed $700 billion bailout of the American financial sector. It was designed to see if Palin understood that the problem in this crisis is that credit and liquidity in the financial system has dried up, and that that's why, in the estimation of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, the government needs to step in to buy up Wall Street's most toxic liabilities. Here's the entire exchange:

COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

This is nonsense—a vapid emptying out of every catchphrase about economics that came into her head. Some commentators, like CNN's Campbell Brown, have argued that it's sexist to keep Sarah Palin under wraps, as if she were a delicate flower who might wilt under the bright lights of the modern media. But the more Palin talks, the more we see that it may not be sexism but common sense that's causing the McCain campaign to treat her like a time bomb.

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start. The next administration is going to face a set of challenges unlike any in recent memory. There is an ongoing military operation in Iraq that still costs $10 billion a month, a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is not going well and is not easily fixed. Iran, Russia and Venezuela present tough strategic challenges.

Domestically, the bailout and reform of the financial industry will take years and hundreds of billions of dollars. Health-care costs, unless curtailed, will bankrupt the federal government. Social Security, immigration, collapsing infrastructure and education are all going to get much worse if they are not handled soon.

And the American government is stretched to the limit. Between the Bush tax cuts, homeland-security needs, Iraq, Afghanistan and the bailout, the budget is looking bleak. Plus, within a few years, the retirement of the baby boomers begins with its massive and rising costs (in the trillions).

Obviously these are very serious challenges and constraints. In these times, for John McCain to have chosen this person to be his running mate is fundamentally irresponsible. McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, it is simply not true.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/161204

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How Soon We Forget - the Keating Five

Have you every known anyone who was the wildest kid in town, but in his/her 50s says they always lived a placid, upright life?  What can you do when they tell you this but smile and think to yourself, right! why are you lying to yourself this way?  You don't want to respond directly because you know they won't hear you.  The lie has gotten so big in their head that they believe their own made up story.

I wonder if that has happened with McCain and his adventures as part of the Keating Five.  Only difference is that McCain was no kid, he was already in his fifties.

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Rosa Brooks:
Keating 5 ring a bell?
McCain's past collides with the present Wall Street debacle.
Rosa Brooks
September 25, 2008
Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today's dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent's S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors' federally insured savings in risky ventures. When those lost money, Keating tried to hide the losses from regulators by inducing his customers to switch from insured accounts to uninsured (and worthless) bonds issued by Lincoln's near-bankrupt parent company. In 1989, it went belly up -- and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish.

Keating went to prison, and McCain's Senate career almost ended. Together with the rest of the so-called Keating Five -- Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio), Don Riegle (D-Mich.) and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), all of whom had also accepted large donations from Keating and intervened on his behalf -- McCain was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and ultimately reprimanded for "poor judgment."

But the savings and loan crisis mushroomed. Eventually, the government spent about $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to bail out hundreds of failed S&Ls that, like Keating's, fell victim to a combination of private-sector greed and the "poor judgment" of politicians like McCain.

The $125 billion seems like small change compared to the $700-billion price tag for the Bush administration's proposed Wall Street bailout. But the root causes of both crises are the same: a lethal mix of deregulation and greed.

Today's meltdown began when unscrupulous mortgage lenders pushed naive borrowers to sign up for loans they couldn't afford to pay back. The original lenders didn't care: They pocketed the upfront fees and quickly sold the loans to others, who sold them to others still. With the government MIA, soon mortgage-backed securities were zipping around the globe. But by the time many ordinary people began to struggle to make their mortgage payments, the numerous "good" loans (held by borrowers able to pay) had gotten hopelessly mixed up with the bad loans. Investors and banks started to panic about being left with the hot potato -- securities backed mainly by worthless loans. And so began the downward spiral of a credit crunch, short-selling, stock sell-offs and bankruptcies.

Could all this have been prevented? Sure. It's not rocket science: A sensible package of regulatory reforms -- like those Barack Obama has been pushing since well before the current meltdown began -- could have kept this most recent crisis from escalating, just as maintaining reasonable regulatory regimes for S&Ls in the '80s could have prevented that crisis (McCain learned this the hard way).

But, despite his political near-death experience as a member of the Keating Five, McCain continued to champion deregulation, voting in 2000, for instance, against federal regulation of the kind of financial derivatives at the heart of today's crisis.

Shades of the Keating Five scandal don't end there. This week, for instance, news broke that until August, the lobbying firm owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was paid $15,000 a month by Freddie Mac, one of the mortgage giants implicated in the current crisis (now taken over by the government and under investigation by the FBI). Apparently, Freddie Mac's plan was to gain influence with McCain's campaign in hopes that he would help shield it from pesky government regulations. And until very recently, Freddie Mac executives probably figured money paid to Davis' firm was money well spent. "I'm always in favor of less regulation," McCain told the Wall Street Journal in March.

These days, McCain is singing a different tune.

"There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week, explaining the sudden mass conversion of so many onetime free marketeers into champions of robust government intervention. Fair enough. But as you try to figure out what and who can get us out of this mess, beware of those who now embrace regulation with the fervor of new converts.

rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com

for link to LAT article click

here

Ike's Missing

2 more bodies found this weekend

http://www.galvnews.com/
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Two weeks after Ike, more than 400 are still missing
By LISE OLSEN
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 28, 2008, 1:40AM


Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba. A drowning cat cried outside. Her Jeep bobbed in the seawater surging around her home.

Ettenger, 58, told her friend she was reading old love letters by flashlight. "I think I really screwed up this time," she said, according to Monroe Burks, Ettenger's neighbor who had evacuated to Houston.

That was Friday, Sept 12. On Wednesday — 12 days later — her nearly nude body was found face down by a huge debris pile in a remote mosquito-ridden marsh in Chambers County, about 10 miles inland from where her gray beach house once stood.

Two weeks after Hurricane Ike swept through the Texas coast, 400 people remain missing, mostly from Galveston County, according to an analysis of calls logged to a hot line set up by the nonprofit Laura Recovery Center to assist local authorities.

Until Wednesday, Ettenger was one of them.

About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood.

Hot line and rescue workers hope that many people, especially on Galveston Island, will be reunited with family and friends as hurricane recovery efforts continue. More than 145 already have been located through blogs, media Web sites, Red Cross shelter lists, endless phone calls, welfare checks and sometimes dramatic rescues led by the Galveston County Sheriff's Office and other agencies.

Yet disturbing tales told by survivors from Bolivar communities like Gilchrist, Crystal Beach and Port Bolivar suggest some may never return.

"There's still lots of people who are not accounted for," said Capt. Rod Ousley, of the State Parks & Wildlife Service, which is helping to search for survivors or bodies in remote corners of several coastal counties. "We don't know if they got washed out to sea, or buried in the sand or in debris piles. We just keep looking until they come up ... we're just going to keep trying."

Too late for rescue
Still missing is the grandmother of 16-year-old Jerrith Baird. Baird told the Chronicle that Jennifer Mclemore, 58, refused to abandon her beach house in the village of Gilchrist, despite his pleas that she retreat to High Island, where he lives. Mclemore believed her home, battered and rebuilt after Hurricane Rita, could survive a Category 2 storm.

When the first waves of seawater started to flood Gilchrist early on Sept. 12, Baird called the Coast Guard, begging for her rescue. "They said they were doing the best they could," he said. "But by the time they got around to it, the wind was too high. They couldn't fly."

Flights were suspended after about 100 people were rescued from the peninsula, leaving at least 150 still stranded, according to a Sept. 13 Coast Guard press release.

Mclemore holed up at home with her pit bull Hoodoo. At 8 p.m., her cell phone went dead, her worried grandson on the other end.

The next morning, Baird set out to find her the only way he could: he kayaked with a friend about eight miles through the marshes and debris along the ravaged coastline.

"There's really nothing left of Gilchrist. We were kayaking over our friends' cars that were out there that got washed away. It wasn't fun. I was just in total shock," he said.

Hours later, Baird reached the spot where his grandmother's house had stood. Nothing remained except a few snapped pilings, he said.

The search for survivors is an arduous one, stymied by the size and scope of the storm, which propelled wrecked boats as far south as Padre Island.

A handful of volunteer fire department members have led the search on the peninsula itself. Meanwhile, dozens of sheriff's deputies, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Texas State Parks & Wildlife Department wardens are patrolling vast marshlands and other remote areas, including roadless sections of Chambers County where storm debris fields stretch for miles.

Airboats, four-wheelers, search dogs and helicopters are being used to scour areas where the water and wind blew cars, homes and animals, creating seemingly insurmountable piles of wreckage and waste.

"Some of these debris piles are real, real tall and real real wild areas with nothing but boards and nails and snakes and alligators and mosquitoes," Ousley said. "This is some of the hardest recovery efforts we've ever faced with the storm surge and what all it moved and the debris that moved with it."

Washed off road?
Searchers confirm they've also spotted countless cars in the floodwaters and marshes. It's impossible to tell which were once occupied, though so far no bodies have been reported recovered from vehicles sticking out above water. Submerged vehicles are not being searched.

Raul "Roy" Arrambide last heard from his mother, sister and nephew as the three prepared to evacuate by car from Port Bolivar.

Just after 6 a.m. Sept. 12, his sister, Magdalena Strickland, 51, called from the house to say they were leaving. The family's 2000 white Ford Taurus and 1993 maroon Ford pickup were loaded and idling in the driveway. It was a quick call, since Strickland was eager to go.

His mother, Marion Violet Arrambide, 79, along with Strickland and Arrambide's nephew, Shane Williams, 33, had planned to evacuate to Arrambide's house near Dallas. They had two vehicles but no cell phone. They never arrived.

Roy Arrambide fears they were washed off the road.

After the storm, he hired an airboat to visit the area, where he saw dozens of submerged cars in the floodwaters and marshes along the peninsula's lone low-lying highway. But neither he nor anyone else has found his relatives or their vehicles. The house they left behind was damaged but intact.

Eight people, mostly from the Crystal Beach Volunteer Fire Department, have formed the core of continuing search efforts on the peninsula, though the members of Texas Task Force 2 came to conduct rescues, house-to-house reviews and provide other assistance.

"We have not gotten enough help, we're worn out," said Shawn Hall, a member of the High Island Volunteer Fire Department who said he joined the VFD search team for 12 days straight. "We have not had the resources to do the proper searches that need to done." He said they have relied on airboats provided by out-of-state volunteers.

So far, Galveston County Sheriff's Office officials, busy with searches themselves, have not allowed volunteers from Texas' EquuSearch, a nonprofit that specializes in searches, to respond to requests from families of 18 missing people on the peninsula, according to Tim Miller, its executive director.

Also unaccounted for are several transient beach residents who lived in travel trailers on the waterfront in places like Rollover Pass and San Leon.

'She needed to count'
Relatives and friends of the missing said they will keep pushing authorities to expand searches and to establish reliable and complete lists of missing persons.

"I didn't want the same thing in Galveston as in New Orleans, where they had all these unclaimed people after Hurricane Katrina," said JoAnnBurks, who was Gail Ettenger's neighbor and close friend. "I didn't want that for Gail. She needed to count."

Ettenger, a contract chemist who worked for ExxonMobil in Beaumont, loved living at the beach. She rose before dawn each day to walk with Reba, an aging black and white spotted Great Dane who looked like a Holstein calf.

Outside, Ettenger grew towering birds of paradise. Inside, she filled her bungalow with mementos: a wolfskin from New Mexico, a collection of nautical antiques and endless snapshots of Reba and beach sunsets.

All is lost now. Even Reba.

lise.olsen@chron.com

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for link to article click here

Cantinflas crossing the border

Amnesty in the UK?

The word amnesty means? - letting people live in peace - without fear of ICE raids (among other things)

--
Independent.co.uk
Anthony Browne: Why we should grant illegal immigrants an amnesty

At present we have the worst of all worlds in turning a blind eye to them

Friday, 26 September 2008

Like many attractive places to live, Britain has a problem with illegal immigration. But while there has been endless debate about how to reduce the flow of illegal immigration, there has been very little discussion of the far more politically and morally fraught issue of how to respond to illegal immigrants already living here.

With porous borders, Britain has built up a large stock of illegal immigrants, including those who entered illegally and those who entered legally but overstayed their visas. Estimates range from around 400,000 to a million, and they are concentrated in London and the south-east. Many have been here a very long time. There are three policy responses to this – engage in a mass deportation, accept the status quo, or have an amnesty.

Policy makers are usually in denial about it, but there is simply no prospect of a mass deportation of illegal immigrants. There is a very powerful moral case for not deporting people who have successfully settled here – no country that sees itself as civilised wants to send immigration officials into schools, yanking distraught children away from their distressed classmates. Deportations are also incredibly time consuming and expensive, making it difficult for the Government to meet even its comparatively modest deportation targets.

Should we then just leave the status quo? This is what politicians tend to find most convenient, but it is not cost free. Living without legal status obviously creates huge problems for the migrants themselves, but there is also a cost on wider society. Strong, integrated communities are the building blocks of a successful country, but they are undermined if there is a large section of the population unable to fully participate.

The third option is the political dynamite known as an amnesty. This is often viewed through an economist's lens, since regularising migrants is likely to mean they will both pay more tax and claim more benefits. However, the precise short-term fiscal impact of an amnesty misses the far more important impact on long-term productivity.

Anyone with even the vaguest belief in free markets must accept that it is economically damaging to have a legal impediment to a large section of the population freely entering the labour market to do the jobs they are best capable of doing. Regularising the status of illegal immigrants would without doubt improve their economic productivity, and boost GDP.

There are two other arguments being made against an amnesty: firstly, that it is a moral hazard, and secondly, that it would be counterproductive. Many believe that as a point of principle, no law-breaking should be rewarded. It is a good principle, but should be applied carefully. There are many archaic laws still on the statute that no court would seek to uphold. And likewise, if the state has simply failed to uphold its immigration laws for a long period of time and let someone live in peace in Britain for many years, the reality of the situation should outweigh a moral point about not rewarding law breaking.

Then there is the danger that an amnesty might be counterproductive because it would send out a message to the world that all you need to do is arrive illegally and you will eventually be legalised. Spain and Italy have indulged in one-off amnesties, encouraging more illegal immigrants to try their luck. But this fear wouldn't be founded if the amnesty is introduced by a government that is already clamping down on illegal immigration.

A one-off amnesty might be politically more sellable, but it wouldn't help reach a long-term settlement of this issue. What would be far better would be to introduce a permanent earned amnesty for those who have been in the country a long time. In fact, Britain already has a long residency concession for illegal immigrants who have been in Britain and making an economic contribution for 14 years.

This, however, is far too long to make much of a difference, and only a few thousand a year take advantage of it. It should be reduced dramatically and the restrictions on it scaled back, giving the right to reside and work to illegal immigrants who have not been imprisoned for criminal offences and who have lived in the UK for seven years at first, and then gradually reducing it.

At present, we have the worst of all worlds, turning a blind eye to illegal immigration, but making it impossible for illegal immigrants to regularise their status. Doing more to enforce immigration law, while accepting the reality that there are long term illegal immigrants who have settled well, would be far fairer, better for society and more economically efficient. All we need is for policy makers to accept reality.

Anthony Browne is director of the Policy Exchange think-tank

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McCain and Palin: Keeping Her Silent

What a great way to have an excuse to keep a woman silent:  hire someone incompetent!

also see "The Question is:  Can Palin give a coherent answer?"    and "Palin sends the cringe meter off the dial" from the London Independent

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McCain Camp Won't Let Palin Spin After Debate
Huffington Post
September 27, 2008

As the New York Times reported before Friday night's debate, Sarah Palin would not be providing post-debate spin for John McCain on the major TV networks:

After Barack Obama and John McCain stop talking on the debate stage Friday night, their surrogates will start spinning. But one high-profile supporter of Mr. McCain will be missing: his running mate Sarah Palin.[...]

Ms. Palin is scheduled to be at a debate-viewing event in Philadelphia, covered by a limited group of reporters, and she is not listed by any networks as a post-debate guest. On NBC and CBS, the former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani will be commenting on the debate performances.

As The New Republic's Michael Crowley noted during the post-debate coverage, Palin's absence looked particularly awkward given the fact that Joe Biden was appearing all over the place:

Amusing moment on CNN just now. Wolf Blitzer, coming out of a commercial:

"We've been getting some emails from views out there wondering why we spent some time interviewing Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee and not Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee. We would have loved to interview--we'd still love to interview Sarah Palin. Unfortunately we asked, we didn't get that interview...We're hoping that Sarah Palin will join us at some point down the road."

I'm told that Biden appeared on every major network tonight except ABC (which only turned him down because Palin wasn't available, on an equal-time sort of basis).

It's pretty strange when a candidate can't trust his own running mate to be out there spinning on his behalf.

for link to Huff Post article click here

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More Immigrants Learning English

Why wouldn't people want to learn English?  Contrary to what many anti-immigrationists say, people really want to learn.  But there are so many complications.

How can you take an English course if you have two jobs?

How could you pay tuition if there are no free classes in your neighborhood?

What do you do if people make fun of your accent?

As far as those ideas some have that people shouldn't immigrate unless they speak English, that is a fairy tale.  Only the middle class and wealthy have the opportunities to learn if they are still living in their countries of origin.  Even then, it is hard to learn the language well because of the limited opportunities to practice...

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/immigration/la-me-census23-2008sep23,0,930289.story
From the Los Angeles Times
U.S. census survey finds more of California's immigrants are joining the mainstream
The number of Spanish-speaking immigrants who are fluent in English is also increasing, survey says.
By Teresa Watanabe and Francisco Vara-Orta
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

September 23, 2008

California's immigrants are more assimilated, with greater proportions reporting last year that they became U.S. citizens and the majority of Spanish speakers now saying they speak English very well, a sharp rise from 2000, according to U.S. census data released today.

Data from the bureau's 2007 American Community Survey showed that California continued to diversify, with whites declining to 42.5% and Latinos, Asians and blacks increasing to 54.4% of the state's population. The foreign-born population inched upward and now make up more than one-fourth of residents in the state and one-third in Los Angeles County.

But bucking perceptions that high levels of immigration are jeopardizing national cohesion, the data showed that today's immigrants, like those before them, are embracing an American identity. In Los Angeles County, for instance, the proportion of native Spanish speakers fluent in English increased to 51.4% in 2007 from 44.6% in 2000. The share of naturalized citizens among the foreign-born grew to 43.3% from 38% over that time.

"Every major study shows that immigrants from whatever country are integrating into our society at the same level and degree as prior immigrants," said Antonia Hernandez, president of the Los Angeles-based California Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that recently launched an initiative to help immigrants adapt here.

"Notwithstanding the rhetoric of anti-immigrant groups," Hernandez said, "immigrants are deeply embedded in the social and economic fabric of Southern California and particularly Los Angeles."

The survey found other changes in the statewide population between 2000 and 2007:

* Latinos increased to 36.2% from 32.4%.

* Asians increased to 12.2% from 10.8%.

* Whites declined to 42.5% from 46.6%.

* Blacks declined to 6% from 6.3%.

The changing nature of California immigrants is one major factor behind the increased assimilation, according to policy experts. There are fewer new immigrants here, as higher living costs have driven more of them to other states; those who remain have been here longer, presumably speak better English and have had time to qualify for U.S. citizenship, according to Michael Fix, vice president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

An institute study of Los Angeles immigrants this year found that the proportion who arrived in the last decade has sharply declined since the 1990s and constituted 18% of all foreign-born residents in 2006. In contrast, 28% of immigrants were newcomers during the 1990s and 1980s, Fix said.

"It seems to me that increases in the number of naturalized immigrants and those who are fluent in English send a strong signal that historic patterns of integration are continuing," he said. "These trends certainly do not support fears that immigration is eroding the nation's social cohesion."

Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., said that declining numbers of illegal immigrants could be another reason to explain the higher levels of English fluency and citizenship. His center estimates that 1 million illegal immigrants, or nearly 10% of the total, left the country between August 2007 and May 2008 amid a declining economy and heightened enforcement against illegal immigration.

Because illegal immigrants have lower rates of education and income than legal ones, he said, their departure may have helped boost the proportion of Americanized immigrants.

In addition, more immigrants are benefiting from a major push to help them adjust to their new homeland.

The California Community Foundation, for instance, has commissioned two major studies on the topic and is kicking off an initiative to expand access to English-language classes, help professional immigrants gain U.S. certification for their skills and promote immigrant parental involvement in their children's education, Hernandez said.

At the federal level, the Bush administration launched a massive assimilation campaign in 2006 and is expanding it this year -- including a free, web-based English class to immigrants on its new site, www.WelcometoUSA.gov.

Meanwhile, the process of becoming American proceeds apace.

On Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, along a boulevard of shops touting Spanish-language signs and Latin American religious icons, immigrants study English and U.S. civics.

Take Luis Perez, 54, a Mexico native who recently retired as a travel agent. He has spent the last 19 of his 20 years in the United States getting by with little English as a legal resident. But as his vision is fading, he's hoping to apply for naturalization this year.

To prepare, Perez spends much of his time poring over a handout of 96 citizenship test questions that he keeps in his backpack. In an impromptu quiz, Perez nailed the answers.

Why does the U.S. flag have so many stars on it? "Because you have one for one state," he responded in heavily accented but understandable English. And who is the president of the United States? "Gee-or-ge Boosh," he said.

Perez said his worsening eyesight from diabetes has made it harder to read and he's worried that he may not be able to take the test before he goes completely blind. "I was stupid," he said in Spanish. "I should have gone to school when I got here. I don't think anyone here wouldn't want to learn English. It makes your life much better."

At a Ritmo Latino record store, Victor Sandoval, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1998 to join his mother, tends to customers beckoned by the shop's $5.99 audio CD packet on learning English.

Although Sandoval, 28, said his English needs work, he easily understands the language and has studied it off and on for four years. But his best education, he said, comes not from work with English-only customers, but at home, with his Mexican American girlfriend.

"She always asks me to talk in English," Sandoval said in English, adding that he and his girlfriend are raising their 1-year-old daughter, Luna, to learn both languages.

"I learn everyday living here in L.A.," he said. "It's like being in class every day."

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

francisco.varaorta

@latimes.com

Data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report

.

Robert Fisk on Wall Street & Iraq

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Robert Fisk's World: Bush rescues Wall Street but leaves his soldiers to die in Iraq

Until the elections, the people in the Middle East are yesterday’s men

Saturday, 27 September 2008

London Independent

It was a weird week to be in the United States. On Tuesday, secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson told us that "this is all about the American taxpayer – that's all we care about". But when I flipped the page on my morning paper, I came across the latest gloomy statistic which Americans should care more about. "As of Wednesday evening, 4,162 US service members and 11 Defence Department civilians had been identified as having died in the Iraq war." By grotesque mischance, $700bn – the cost of George Bush's Wall Street rescue cash – is about the same figure as the same President has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently "won" thanks to the "surge" – for which, read "escalation" – in Baghdad. The fact that the fall in casualties coincides with the near-completion of the Shia ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims is not part of the story.

Indeed, a strange narrative is now being built into the daily history of America. First we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the evil, terrorist-protecting misogynist Islamist crazies called the Taliban, setting up a democratic government under the exotically dressed Hamid Karzai. Then we rushed off to Iraq and overthrew the evil, terrorist-protecting, nuclear-weaponised, secular Baathist crazies under Saddam, setting up a democratic government under the pro-Iranian Shia Nouri al-Maliki. Mission accomplished. Then, after 250,000 Iraqi deaths – or half a million or a million, who cares? – we rushed back to Kabul and Kandahar to win the war all over again in Afghanistan. The conflict now embraces our old chums in Pakistan, the Saudi-financed, American-financed Interservices Intelligence Agency whose Taliban friends – now attacked by our brave troops inside Pakistani sovereign territory – again control half of Afghanistan.

We are, in fact, now fighting a war in what I call Irakistan. It's hopeless; it's a mess; it's shameful; it's unethical and it's unwinnable and no wonder the Wall Street meltdown was greeted with such relief by Messrs Obama and McCain. They couldn't suspend their campaigns to discuss the greatest military crisis in America's history since Vietnam – but for Wall Street, no problem. The American taxpayer – "that's all we care about". Mercifully for the presidential candidates, they don't have to debate the hell-disaster of Iraq any more, nor US-Israeli relations, nor Exxon or Chevron or BP-Mobil or Shell. George Bush's titanic if mythical battle between good and evil has transmogrified into the conflict between good taxpayers and evil bankers. Phew! No entanglement in the lives and deaths of the people of the Middle East. Until the elections – barring another 9/11 – they are yesterday's men and women.

But truth lurks in the strangest of airports. I'm chewing my way though a plate of spiced but heavy-boned chicken wings – final proof of why chickens can't fly – at John Wayne airport in Orange County (take a trip down the escalator and you can actually see a larger-than-life statue of the "Duke"), and up on the screen behind the bar pops Obama himself. The word "Change" flashes on the logo and the guy on my left shakes his head. "I got a brother who's just come back from Afghanistan," he says. "He's been fighting there but says there's no infrastructure so there can be no victory. There's nothing to build on. We're not wanted." At California's San Jose University, a guy comes up and asks me to sign my new book for him. "Write 'To Sergeant 'D'," he says with a sigh. "That's what they call me. Two tours in Iraq, just heading out to Afghanistan." And he rolls his eyes and I wish him safe home afterwards.

Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer gets a look into the debate. McCain's visit to the Middle East and Obama's visit to the Middle East – in which they outdid each other in fawning to the Israeli lobby (Obama's own contribution surely earning him membership of the Knesset if not entry to the White House) – are safely in the past. Without any discussion, Israeli and US officials held a three-day security-technology forum in Washington this month which coincided with an equally undebated decision by the dying Bush administration to give a further $330m in three separate arms deals for Israel, including 28,000 M72A7 66mm light anti-armour weapons and 1,000 GBU-9 small diameter bombs from Boeing. Twenty-five Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets are likely to be approved before the election. The Israeli-American talks were described as "the most senior bilateral high-technology dialogue ever between the two allies". Nothing to write home about, of course.

Almost equally unreported in major US papers – save by the good old Washington Report – was a potential scandal in good old Los Angeles to which Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently returned after a $225,000 junket to Israel with three council members and other city officials (along with families, kids, etc). The purpose? To launch new agreements for security at Los Angeles international airport. Council members waffled away on cellphones and walked out of the chamber when protesters claimed that the council was negotiating with a foreign power before seeking bids from American security services. One of the protesters asked if the idea of handing LAX's security to the Israelis was such a good idea when Israeli firms were operating security at Boston Logan and Newark on 9/11 when a rather sinister bunch of Arabs passed through en route to their international crimes against humanity.

But who cares? 9/11? Come again? What's that got to do with the American taxpayer?

Watch Out for the Witches

Palin's Pastor Went on Witch Hunt in 1999 - See original article after David Waters post.

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Palin's Pastor Problem
Posted by David Waters on September 26, 2008 11:24 AM
Washington Post

In the fine, new American tradition of presidential campaign "pastor disasters," Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin might have one she can call her very own, complete with its own sensational YouTube video and stunned cable TV commentary. You knew it was coming -- but probably didn't suspect it would involve witchcraft.

Back in the fall of 2005, when Palin was running for governor of Alaska, a Kenyan pastor named Thomas Muthee preached several times at Wasilla Assembly of God, Palin's church home for more than two decades. In one service, Palin joined Moothy onstage while he prayed for her.

"We say grace to be reigned upon her in the name of Jesus," Muthee prayed while Palin bowed her head. "We are asking you as the body of Christ in this valley make a way for Sarah even in the political arena . . . Bring finances her way even for the campaign in the name of Jesus . . . Give her men and women who will buck her up in the name of Jesus . . . Oh, Father, use her to turn this nation the other way around . . . "

So far, not that unusual. Intercessory public prayer is a common and often powerful form of encouragement and blessing in evangelical or Pentecostal settings, for politicians or anyone else. But Muthee goes on: "In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft is what you rebuke. In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, father make away now."

Turns out, Muthee began his ministry with a witch hunt against a Kenyan woman he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells, according to the Christian Science Monitor, which first reported the story in 1999. Muthee publicly declared the woman "a witch responsible for the town's ills, and order her to offer her up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu . . . The woman fled."

This past June, in a speech at Wasilla AOG, Palin gave credit to Muthee for her 2006 election victory. In another now-famous YouTube video, Palin says, "As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me . . . He said 'Lord make a way and let her do this next step.' And that's exactly what happened."

Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's designated derider and host of Countdown, was all over Palin's witch hunter connection last Friday: "The Palin's preacher problem: The minister who laid hands on her at the Wasilla Assembly of God in 2005, the one she credits with helping make her a governor, it turns out he makes Jeremiah Wright look like Father Flanagan of Boys Town," Olbermann said in his opening.

Here we go again. People who were in a lather about Wright's sermons know as little about African American church rhetoric and black liberation theology as people who are in a state about Muthee's sermons know about Pentecostal church rhetoric and "spiritual warfare."

As the CSM articles explained, Muthee's ministry is part of a larger "spiritual warfare" movement that uses "an in-depth research effort called 'spiritual mapping' to identify 'demonic forces,' break 'spiritual strongholds' holding communities in their groups, and bring people to Christ. It's also an effective way to put people in the pews and raise revenue.

Not to be too cynical, but Palin isn't the first politician to use (however sincerely) the power of the pulpit to advance her own political career, and she won't be the last. George W. Bush did it. Barack Obama and John McCain do it. You'd be hard-pressed to find a successful politician who hasn't done it.

We'll never know what Palin really believes about "demonic forces" and "spiritual warfare," at least not before Nov. 4. But there are plenty of "demonic" forces to be concerned about in this election -- the greed, fear and violence that are wreaking havoc on the economy, the health care system, the Middle East, our urban areas.

Can we forget the crazy preachers and try to get the candidates to focus on the serious problems?

for link to WaPo article click here

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Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)
September 23, 1999, Thursday
Targeting cities with 'spiritual mapping,' prayer
BYLINE: Jane Lampman, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
SECTION: FEATURES; IDEAS; RELIGION; Pg. 15

BOSTON:  Can the 'spiritual DNA' of a community be altered?" That's the question posed in a Christian video called "Transformations."

Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee is convinced that it can be. In 1988, he and his wife, Margaret, were "called by God to Kiambu," a notorious, violence-ridden suburb of Nairobi and a "ministry graveyard" for churches for years. They began six months of fervent prayer and research.

Pondering the message of Eph.6:12 ("For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world..."), they prayed to identify the source of Kiambu's spiritual oppression, Mr. Muthee says. Their answer: the spirit of witchcraft.

Their research into the community revealed that a woman called "Mama Jane" ran a "divination clinic" frequented by the town's most powerful people.

After months of prayer, Muthee held a crusade that "brought about 200 people to Christ." Their church in the basement of a grocery store was dubbed "The Prayer Cave," as members set up round-the-clock intercession. Mama Jane counterattacked, he says, but eventually "the demonic influence - the 'principality' over Kiambu - was broken," and she left town....

(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society

for complete Christian Science Monitor article click here

S. 3594 - Protection from Unlawful ICE Raids & Detention Act

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For Immediate Release Contact: Douglas Rivlin (rivlin@immigrationforum.org)

September 26, 2008 (202) 383-5989 or (202) 441-0680 (mobile)

Senators Menendez and Kennedy Stand Up For Due Process in Immigration Enforcement

Washington, DC – Last night, Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) introduced S. 3594, the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act, a bill that would preserve basic due process rights for U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and workers involved in labor disputes who are swept up in immigration raids. The following is a statement by Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan, pro-immigrant advocacy group in Washington.

We congratulate Senators Menendez and Kennedy on the introduction of the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act, as it is an important and necessary response to the abuses inflicted on U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders), and other workers in the name of immigration worksite enforcement. Throughout the course of the year, we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of mass immigration raids in which hundreds of workers have been arrested. As the numbers have increased, so has the level of impunity, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents engage in cowboy antics that deny workers basic respect and dignity. These harsh tactics include everything from providing no notice of why individuals are under arrest to the deprivation of basic necessities like medicine, to rapid transfer to facilities far from families and homes. We have seen a further erosion of fundamental American due process of law, interference by ICE with ongoing labor investigations and disputes, and the detention of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents, which is a black mark on our country and our government.

It is clear that ICE is unwilling or unable to police itself, making legislation necessary. This bill also highlights yet again the failures of our broken immigration system. The raids are a misguided attempt to put “tough” enforcement ahead of sensible reform. Raids neither make our country safer nor resolve our immigration crisis. They simply undermine due process and labor protections, resulting in a weaker, rather than a stronger nation.

This bill is a step towards ensuring that the rule of law applies to government officials as well as individuals, that the rights of workers and detainees are respected, and that Congress provides much needed oversight where immigration enforcement is concerned.

Missing Persons - Post Ike

This list was posted on September 23.  It is from Galveston resident, the fabulously40 blogger It is no longer accurate.

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As many of you may know, I was born in Galveston, and raised there with much family, I am a decendent of 1900 storm victims and Im missing loved ones and family. Please read this and pray for us. My uncle is missing and a cousin and many friends.

Hurricane Ike:

The Missing Have Names; Ike Is Missing From The Mainstream Media
Posted By Erin On September 23, 2008 (5:15 pm) In Uncategorized

No newsflash for the hundreds of thousands of people that Hurricane Ike victimized, but Hurricane Ike is virtually gone from mainstream media coverage. It has been replaced by the huge bailout of our entire financial system. Snarkfood promised to continue to follow the story- and today we are listing the names of the people we’ve been able to determine are missing. These names come directly from those who are desperately searching for them. It is by NO means a complete list.

The mainstream media’s refusal to even report a ballpark number of those who are missing is shameful, and high-visibility (celebrity) attention to the problem is ZERO. In defense of the celebrities, they, along with the rest of America are not being told the story.

So we will. Here are the names of some of our American brothers and sisters who’ve been missing since Hurricane Ike hit.

The following have been listed as missing or otherwise unaccounted for by their family members on the ABC 13 (Houston area) Hurricane Ike Missing Persons Locater, and the KHOU forums. Screw the media blackout.

Watch the video. Read the list. Give if you can. www.redcross.org

MISSING:
Bolivar Peninsula
Including Port Bolivar, Crystal Beach, Caplen, Gilchrist, High Island

Alex (no last name given)
Allen, Charles
Amo (Flores?)
Anderson, Bobby (survived, but friend perished)
Arrambide, Marrion
Bagwell, Blaine and mother Ginger
Baker, Rachel
Ball, Danny
Ball, Kristian
Beasley, James
Billy the Kid (across from Sharkey’s)
Bingham, Harry
Bingham, Susan
Bouse, Bobby
Bouse, Charlie and family
Bouse, Dixie and family
Brad (no last name given)
Branstetter, Kent
Brookshire, Rose
Bugler, Harry
Bugler, Susan
Butterfield, L.C.
Butterfield, Sandy
Byrum, Barbara
Byrum, Gardner
Callender, Deena
Campbell, Michael
Cannon, Colin
Cannon, Michelle
Carol (Crystal Canals Bait Camp)
Carol (Tuna St.)
Carr, Frank
Carrington, Lee
Cecil and Tommy (High Island)
Chapman, Larry
Chapman, Suzy
Cheryl (the nurse)
Cloud, Michael
Comeaux, Joe
Comeaux, Sylvia
Comeaux (other family members?)
Cook, Lee
Cook, Sandy
Cottrell, Shirley
Cranford, Kim
Cranford, Treton
Dean, Anne
Donaldson, Mary
Droege, Carolyn
Droege, Dick
Dud (at Decoux’s)
Dunn, Glennis
Ettenger, Gail
Felty, Veronica
Fisher, Walter
Floyd (Garza’s Grocery)
Fortenberry, David
Fortenberry, Sandy
Gatlin, Chris
Gatlin, Karen
Glen (Red)
Gloria (Cottage by the Sea)
Grebb, Robert
Grissom, Richard
Grissom, Stephanie
Haigh, Jack
Hamilton, Earl
Hamilton, Shirley
Hardcastle, Lynnette
Harris, Terry
Haworth, Susan
Hayes, Cheryl
Hayes, Richard
Hill, George
Hill, Martin
Holmes, Don
Howard, Greb
Howard, John
Howard, Lois
Jock, Jessica and family
Johnson, Lynette
Johnson, Sue
Jones, Daisy
Jones, Dewy
Jones, Jack
Kahla, Mary and family
Kelly, Linda
Kelly, Richard
King, Darryl
King, Robert
King, Sandy
Knight, Beverly and husband
Kreuzer Family
Lavalle, Ellie
Ledhe, Don
Lee, Judy
Lee, Robert and Gail and Gina
Lisa (18th and Galveston)
Lopez, Jim
Manley, Jerry
Marchese, Carol
Marcia (message therapist)
Mardis, Carol
Mardis, Darryl
Martin, Buster
Martinez, Cindy
Maxwell, Edith
McGready, Jean
McGready, Tom
McKnight, JC
McKnight, Lori
McManus, Barbara
McManus, James
Micak Family
Mobley, Zenith
Moore, Steve and family
Moseley, Herman
Mouton, Darby
Mouton, Sis
Myers, Marta
Myers, Ralph
Neis, Adam
Nguyen, Father (St. Theresa’s)
Ochoa, Phil
Pilsner, E.A. and family
Pond, James
Rankin, Beth
Reed, Bill
Reedy, Bill
Reedy, Jeannie
Rodriguez Family
Rodriguez, Greg
Ron and wife Dorothy (Melody Lane)
Rogers, Larry
Rogers, Mary
Rush, Harly
Rush, Kathy
Russell, Gene
Scherry
Schley, Barbara
Schley, Claud
Schmidt, Dee
Schmidt, Matt
Segura Family
Shaw, Barry
Shaw, Feather
Shinker, Andy
Shook, Jerry
Silcox, Andie
Simpton, Joyce
Skidmore, Ellen
Smith, Beth
Steppe, Francine
Steve (friend of David Pickett)
Stines, Kahla and family and friends
Stockton, David
Stockton, Patty
Strahan, Alecia
Strickland, Magdelena
Tiki Man Kevin
Tom and Daniela (no last name given)

Tovar, Mario and family
Tovar, Omar
Turner, Karon
Turner, Willis
Vance, Paul
Vidrine, Carol and family
Vidrine, PJ and family
Vrana, Ray
Walker, Phyllis
Walker, Sandra
Walker, Sonny
Walton, Sandie
Wanda (Crystal Canal RV Park)
Ward, Terri and family
Werner, Donna and Lauren
Werner, Ed
Wesley (Crystal Beach Rd.)
White, Billy
Will (on Yuca)
Williams, Bruce
Williams, Carol
Williams, Shane
Wisenbaker, Mikey and family
Wisenbaker, Mycol and

Galveston County / Galveston Island
MISSING:

Allen, A.J.
Allen, Betty
Allen, Carolyn
Allen, Jackie
Allen, Regina
Allmond, Donna
Banks, Leon Jr.
Bartram, Gracie
Bartram, Kevin
Bartram, Peggy
Beynice, Rosalyn
Boyd, Keith and family
Bradley, Bobby
Brock, Margo
Brown, Maine
Brown, Nana
Brown, Russel
Brown, Trixie
Bustamante, Richard and family
Campos, Lalo
Campos, Rita
Carrera, Juan
Chambers, Doreece
Coker, Sonya
Cole, Natalie and daughters
Collindrina, Penny
Cowan, Paula
Cox, Harold
Crabb, Sammie
DaPra, Johnny
Doyle, Patrick
Dubious, Chester
Dubious, Shirley
Ferguson, Mae Joyce
Ferguson, Wendell
Ficklen, Bill
Ficklen, Crystal
Ficklen, Delaine
Ficklen, Gail
Ficklen, James
Ficklen, Kim
Ficklen, Linda
Ficklen, Maverick
Ficklen, Willie
Gallagher, Joe
Grace (aunt of Lynn Robinson)
Graham, Ward
Hannon, Matt
Heinrich, Paul and family
Holmes, Agnes
Horn, Francis
Howlett, Bruce
Howlett, Tammy
Jamison, Ed
Johnson, Nell
Kuehne, Ashley
Lane, Jack
Lane, Tonka
Manago, Shawna and kids
Marsh, Jessica
Marsh, Steve
Melasome, Willie Mae
Moore, Ray Jr.
Nebout, Jim
Nebout, Phyllis
Nolan, Jim
Pembleton, Greg
Pollard, Earl
Pope, Dwayne
Powell, Marie
Rasmussen, A.J.
Ruiz, Ernan and children
Russo, Candy
Salazar, Jesus
Salmassi, Alex
Schultz, Susan (not her, but her aunt)
Shaffer, Richard
Smythe, Ed
Smythe, Marlo
Stewart, Thelma and friends Tina and Peanut
Swindell, Henry
Swindell, Robbie
Thomas, Kenneth (deceased)
Thomas, William
Toale, Tim
Trapani, Eddie
Trapani, Ray
Webber, Brigette
Webber, Tommy
Webster Family
Weedman, Joe
Wilson, George
Woodard, Marie
York, Robert
Zeon, Denise
Zeon, Zae

Chambers County
MISSING:
Cormier, Cecil
Cormier, Sam
Fleischman, Joyce
Fleischman, Morris
Hacker, Annette
Hacker, Chad
Scrivner, Earl
Scrivner, Judy

List of Missing Persons - Hurricane IKE

List from the Laura Recovery Center:

List of Missing Persons - Upload a Document to Scribd

400+ Missing from Hurricane IKE -

 Galveston County missing persons number 866-898-5723.
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400 Missing
ABC- KTRK Channel 11
Houston
September 24, 2008

GALVESTON, TX (KTRK) -- The death toll from Hurricane Ike has reached at least 27 in Texas. A body was found in a pile of debris in Chambers County. And hundreds of people are still unaccounted for in Galveston County and surrounding areas.

Nearly 400 people are presumed missing 12 days after Hurricane Ike slammed on shore. Calls flooded a Galveston County missing persons hotline at the Laura Recovery Center. People are terrified a relative was lost in the storm.

After days of waiting, some families got the answers they've prayed for.

"Someone just called in from Clear Creek ISD off a call we had made and said they have located some people associated with the school district and said they were safe and well in Texas City," said Terry Arnold with the Laura Recovery Center.

But hundreds more wait for word as their loved ones names fill an online hurricane missing persons database. Those on the list share some commonalties in age and geography.

"There are a lot of elderly folks, just looking at the age column," said Smither.

Many of them are from the hardest hit areas of the county, including Boliver, Crystal Beach and Gilchrist.

"We desperately need to try and find out what happened to those folks to try and reunite the families," said Arnold.

They're trying to find out what happened to people like Sandy Walton and Joel Chapman and bring them home.

If you know of a missing person in Galveston County, you can call 866-898-5723.

Alabama Cuts Out DREAMers from Community Colleges

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Chronicle of Higher Education
September 25, 2008

Alabama Board Bars Illegal Immigrants From State's 2-Year Colleges

The Alabama State Board of Education approved a new policy today banning
illegal immigrants from the state's two-year colleges, the Associated
Press reported.

The board approved the policy by a vote of 4 to 0. One member abstained,
and three others were absent. Also missing from the vote was the board's
president, Gov. Bob Riley, a Republican. The policy changes will take
effect in the spring of 2009.

Two advocates for immigrants spoke out against the measure during the
meeting, in Pell City, Ala. Bradley Byrne, chancellor of the state's
community-college system, proposed the change, saying Alabama taxpayers
should not be asked to foot the bill to educate people who cannot
legally work in the state.

The board's action came one month after North Carolina's State Board of
Community Colleges voted to bar illegal immigrants from enrolling in the
state's 58 community colleges while it commissioned a study on the
politically charged issue. -Katherine Mangan

for link to article click here

thanks to Michael Olivas for sending this along

UK will now have an ID card for all

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Smith unveils design for ID card

By Jack Doyle, PA
Thursday, 25 September 2008

London Independent

The design for the new identity card was unveiled by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith today.

Each card will carry a picture and a chip holding the person's name and date of birth, fingerprint record and other biometric data.

It will also detail the holder's visa status and right to work.

The cards will be issued to foreign nationals from November and from next year to people working in airports and other high security jobs.

From 2011 everyone over the age of 16 applying for a passport will have their details added to a national identity register.

Ministers argue the cards will boost national security, tackle identity fraud, prevent illegal working and improve border controls.

But opponents say ID cards are unnecessary, costly and impinge liberty.

There are also fears about the security of personal data after a string of government data loss blunders.

Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti said: "This week the Prime Minister said he doesn't do PR but clearly the Home Secretary wasn't listening.

"The public will yawn at yet another re-launch of this scheme and if the card came with loyalty points, we still wouldn't buy it.

"Picking on foreigners first is divisive politics; as costly to our race relations as our purses."

Earlier this week Home Office minister Meg Hillier was forced to row back after claiming ID cards could be issued to children as young as 14

.
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Britain unveils new ID card amid criticism
By Michael Holden
Reuters/Washington Post
Thursday, September 25, 2008; 9:30 AM

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain unveiled its new biometric identity card on Thursday which the government says will be vital in fighting illegal immigration and terrorism, while critics call it an expensive attack on civil liberties.

The controversial multi-billion pound scheme, which involves one of the world's most ambitious biometric projects, will see ID cards used in Britain for the first time since they were abolished after World War Two.

Initially only foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area will be required to have one if they come to Britain to work or study, but the scheme will be expanded to Britons and some others over the next few years.

"We all want to see our borders more secure, and human trafficking, organized immigration crime, illegal working and benefit fraud tackled," said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

"ID cards for foreign nationals, in locking people to one identity, will deliver in all these areas."

Despite a series of embarrassing data losses recently, including the admission that the personal details of half the population had been mislaid, the government insists that both the cards and their related databases will be secure.

But critics of the cards, which will contain personal details, fingerprints and a facial image, remain unimpressed.

Both major opposition parties have vowed to ditch cards for Britons should they win power, and with the Labour government trailing in the polls, the 4.7 billion pound national identity scheme's days may already be numbered.

"It does not matter how fancy the design of ID cards is, they remain a grotesque intrusion on the liberty of the British people," said Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman.

"When voting adults are forced to carry ID cards, this scheme will prove to be a laminated poll tax," he added, referring to the local charge whose massive unpopularity led to Margaret Thatcher being ousted as prime minister.

The first cards for foreign nationals will be issued in November while from next year anyone working in sensitive areas, such as airport staff, will need one at a cost of 30 pounds.

Smith said opinion polls showed the majority of the public supported the cards and that people would warm to them once they saw the advantages, allowing them to easily verify who they are and helping the authorities at the same time.

(Editing by Steve Addison)

Undocumented workers rebuild southeast Texas after IKE

What a shame. So now the Houston Chronicle is being used as an announcement piece to let others know that someone has called ICE on an undocumented worker. It is common knowledge that anti-immigrant groups have organized to submit hateful and insidious comments to newspaper articles concerning immigration.

Several of the comments are from people who say they are U.S. citizens and can't find jobs. Maybe they should stand outside a Home Depot for a few days and take on a job cleaning up after IKE. The undocumented workers wouldn't be needed if we had more local people wanting to do this type of work.

I wish the day workers would go on strike just so we could see what would happen to the Houston-Galveston area. Maybe I should say "to see what wouldn't happen..."





MoneyforNothin (27)
MoneyforNothin wrote:
I just called in an APB for __-year-old ________, an undocumented immigrant from southern Mexico known to hang out with three dozen men at the corner of ____ and ___th. ICE is on the case.
9/25/2008 5:39:58 AM
Recommend: (10) (7)  - from the Houston Chronicle

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Cleanup spurs labor need
Undocumented workers will be linchpin in efforts
By JENALIA MORENO and SUSAN CARROLL Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 25, 2008, 7:12AM

All across southeast Texas, roofs need repair, debris must be discarded and towns hope to rebuild.

Hurricane Ike's destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny facet of the region's labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be done by illegal immigrants.

Homeowners have already turned to day laborers — many of whom are undocumented — to help clear brush, tent roofs and repair other storm damage. Contractors have hired them to rebuild or restore businesses and the city's infrastructure. And the major work of rebuilding small towns along the Gulf Coast or big homes in Galveston will likely be aided by undocumented workers.

But this tug and pull of the labor force highlights an uneasy dilemma: The region needs the muscle of undocumented immigrants, but simultaneously is a cog in a broader crackdown of illegal immigrants at worksites.

"There's just no mechanism in place right now to provide those important laborers work authorization," said Leigh Ganchan, a Houston immigration attorney with Haynes and Boone. "It's a shame that employers can't tap into a whole segment of society that's willing and capable to provide those services. Our nation is more vulnerable than it would like to admit, I think. Vulnerable, meaning we need people to help us rebuild our infrastructure after major disasters like this."

Carlos González, Mexico's consul general in Houston, expects the area's existing immigrant population will do the rebuilding work, a key difference with what happened post-Katrina. New Orleans experienced an influx of Hispanic immigrants because it did not have as large of an immigrant population as Houston.

"You will find the immigrant community — as they always have — will play a very big role," said Laura Murillo, president of the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

However, Americans devastated by the storm should have the option of doing the rebuilding, said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for a Washington, D.C.-group that seeks to stop illegal immigration.

"Those people should have first crack at the reconstruction jobs," said Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "I'm sure there are an awful lot of people who can use the jobs and use the paychecks to get themselves back on their feet."

The looming demand for immigrant labor for rebuilding efforts illustrates how dependent Texas industry and commerce are on undocumented workers.

According to a 2006 study by the Greater Houston Partnership, construction is the largest employer of undocumented workers in the city, employing nearly 36,000 people.

"The storm hasn't done anything but point out again how badly these workers are needed and how much they contribute," said Angela Blanchard, president and chief executive officer of Neighborhood Centers Inc.

Chase Duhon, with an Austin-based company that contracted to remove brush and debris across Houston, said he's having trouble finding legal local workers to help with hurricane cleanup. He posted an ad online to find more workers.
"We don't hire anyone who's illegal," said Duhon, a Houston native. "We want to keep it local. We want to use people here in Texas, but there's so much work, there are people coming from Michigan and Massachusetts."

Paralyzed by politics, immigration reform has yet to be approved by Congress despite years of hot debate. Supporters of reforms — such as a guest worker program — say storms like Ike prove how hard it is for employers to fill certain jobs.
"We need the labor. These people want to work," said Norman Adams, co-founder of Texans for Sensible Immigration Reform and president of Adams Insurance Service. "I don't think anybody has enough workers here."

Adams said the contractor repairing his water-damaged office building in the Heights area after the storm hired immigrant workers.

Honduran immigrant Esteban Valle, 49, said construction work has picked up since Ike hit.
"I think there's more work," said Valle, a legal permanent resident who previously lived in Dallas. "But it's easier for me because I have papers."

At one of the city's most popular day labor sites, the competition was stiff, with those skilled in trades like roof repair and hanging plaster wallboard often getting picked first.
"It's difficult because we don't have papers, and there are so many people," said 22-year-old Emanuel Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from southern Mexico, gesturing to three dozen men gathered at the corner of Shepherd Drive and 11th.
Staff writer Jim Pinkerton contributed to this report.
jenalia.moreno@chron.com susan.carroll@chron.com

for link to article click here

Missing Person Blogs - Hurricane Ike

Red Cross Missing Persons web page

ABC-News links to missing person pages listed by County

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Houston KHOU Blog
Missing Persons in Bolivar

There are many postings going back to September 16, 2008.  These below are from September 21-24, 2008

Posted by: Jim and Donna | September 21, 2008 at 07:06 PM

has anyone heard from anyone of the gilchrist fire department. my husband paul use to be a volunteer up there and all we have are house numbers for them, and if anyone has any information on any of them you may contact me at minordetail@hotmail.com or call me at 432-438-0056


Posted by: Janice Oliver | September 21, 2008 at 09:35 PM

I do not know where Debbie McManus and family went to, but I know they left. Will try to find out where they are for you.

Posted by: Janice Oliver | September 21, 2008 at 09:37 PM

if anyone contacts april rosenthal please have her call us we are very worried about her and rick also sam debbie monica and royce even marty my name is sandra vidrine and my number is 4324380056

Posted by: sandra vidrine | September 21, 2008 at 11:17 PM

Charles & Shirley Senseney and Frank are at Diana's house in High Island. They are all safe. Rhea and family are in Beaumont. The Strimples from what I have been told are in Winnie with Coot. There have been a few asking about Deena Callender...I have no word on her at this time, I have been asking around but no such luck.

Posted by: Laura K. | September 22, 2008 at 08:07 AM

George,
BJ Jewell is fine. She went to Arlington for the storm and is staying with a friend on the mainland. I'll call with more details.
Sherry

Posted by: Sherry | September 22, 2008 at 08:25 AM

SANDRA VIRDINE- i passed it on to my mother- she may have contact for april and those. I am sure they got out safely! I saw the Gilchrist ambulance under water in the bay about 1 mile from where it should have been- Nothing was normal down there! A sad sight to see, indeed.

Posted by: racheal huber | September 22, 2008 at 08:55 AM

Jean golden was brought to a nursing home in austin.

Posted by: lisa | September 22, 2008 at 08:55 AM

Looking for info on:
The Hornbecks-Jimmy, Nan, and Ronnie


Sam Pate
rwmmdj2@bellsouth.net

Posted by: Sherry | September 22, 2008 at 09:50 AM

YOU ARE SO WELCOME JULY'S CELL IS 409-682-5716

Posted by: Kimberly Voigt | September 22, 2008 at 10:25 AM

We have a house located at 1615 Madison in Bolivar. We are trying to get in touch with our neighbors, Bobby and Peggy Bouse. Through the website www.noaa.gov I was able to find post Ike aerial views of our homes. It appears they are still standing. I don't know if Bobby and Peggy were going to Jasper or maybe even to Peggy's brother's around the Dallas area. If anyone knows where they are and how to get in touch with them I would greatly appreciate the info.
THANKS! THANKS! THANKS!

Posted by: Kimi McLaurin | September 22, 2008 at 12:01 PM

Looking for Susan Haworth living in the Crystal Beach bay front area. This is your brother, please contact me at 832-579-8424 or warogre1@yahoo.com. Thank you very much!

Posted by: Stephen Haworth | September 22, 2008 at 01:17 PM

Have received good news about Jean & Alton Cripps and family. They are all safe. Still no news about Ronnie Hornbeck or his brother Jimmy and his family.

Posted by: Helen Kinchen DuClos | September 22, 2008 at 03:02 PM

God bless you for this site. Does anyone have a phone number for John and Vicki Tucker (who are safe in Santa Fe)? Also, does anyone know about Shirley and Chester DuBois from Crystal Beach? Or the Indian couple who owned BayView?
Patricia West Hays and Conan West in Dallas

214-341-6561
pwesthays@sbcglobal.net.

We are keeping all of you in our prayers. We have been coming there since the 1940's. My parents lost a house in Gilchrist, then built the one in Emerald II. We knew the house might go someday, but we never, ever thought we'd lose a whole community. Our love to all of you out there.

Posted by: Darugh | September 22, 2008 at 06:20 PM

Here is the link to the Red Cross "disaster safe" page. You can list yourself as safe or post information on loved ones that you are looking for.

Link to Red Cross "disaster safe page"

I hope it helps someone reconnect with those they are looking for.

Posted by: Shawn | September 22, 2008 at 06:49 PM

Anyone knowing how to contact any of our High Island students--we will start school on Monday, October 13! GO CARDINALS!

Posted by: Janice Oliver | September 22, 2008 at 09:07 PM

SHERRY-- thank u so much. we love the people volunteer firefighters and ambulance people and would love to know that they r well and just talk to them so any info would be greatly appreciated

Posted by: sandra vidrine | September 22, 2008 at 10:58 PM

I am thinking about all of you on Bolivar,
I worked at Bolivar Water for 10 years
and have been worried about what has happened.
If there is anything I can do to help just
call. I talked to Janet and she is doing well,
I pray for all of you.

Posted by: Lynda Hodges | September 23, 2008 at 06:12 AM

I spoke with O. Mike Kirkpatrick yesterday.

HE IS OK.

Thank You, to everyone, for getting the word out.

You are all in my prayers.

-Bryan

Posted by: B. Elliott | September 23, 2008 at 08:27 AM

Just wondering about the information on High Island ISD. If you read this Ms. Oliver, please reply, since I know that you are tied in with the school. Alan is really hoping that the school is going to open.

Posted by: Laura K. | September 23, 2008 at 09:33 AM

This is David Altemus in Crystal Beach. Hope everyone faired the hurricane. My family is fine, our home has some damage but is still standing. The construction Unlimited crew is all safe. If anyone needs anything please call me at 409-739-7732 or Jeff at 409-739-6619.

Posted by: David Altemus | September 23, 2008 at 09:49 AM

Laurel Hendricks is OK!!!

Posted by: Christina Johnson | September 23, 2008 at 10:19 AM

Laura K--I tried to call your mom yesterday but got no answer. School will start on Monday, October 13. We will have a school year!

Love, Miss O

Posted by: Janice Oliver | September 23, 2008 at 11:38 AM

Janice---Mom and Dad have been going back and forth, and Alan is with me right now. My email address is BHMom101@aol.com...email me and I will send you their cell numbers along with mine as well. Thanks for the information...Alan is really glad.

Posted by: Laura K. | September 23, 2008 at 03:47 PM

Laura Lea spoke with Jimmy Hornbeck and Ronnie is with them. They are all fine. They are at his daughter's house in League City.

Posted by: Shelley & Laura Lea | September 23, 2008 at 05:55 PM

To Burna Dean:
Cliff & Becky Boudlouck are fine and somewhere in San Antonio, I think is what Sharon Becker said. Laura Lea & Stevie are with her daughter in Missouri City. Sharon Becker is with her son in Houston and Norma Lee C. is with her daughter in Houston.

Posted by: Shelley & Laura Lea | September 23, 2008 at 06:06 PM

Looking for Sylvia and Joe Comeaux. Sylvia give me a call 409-466-2315. Looks like we got that beach front property we talked about. :(

Posted by: Annetta Alphonso | September 23, 2008 at 10:40 PM

Looking for Ralph and Marta Myers from Crystal Beach, does anyone know where they are located?
thanks and God Bless

Posted by: SHERRY | September 24, 2008 at 01:13 AM

Looking for Pete Merrich from Crystal Beach. If anyboby knows his whereabouts or contact info, please contact Shannon Everitt at seeveritt@yahoo.com or call 281-432-9717.Pete flounder fished almost everyday in the fall at Rollover Pass as did I and we became friends but I am not positive about the spelling of the last name. Thanks for any info you might have.

Posted by: Shannon Everitt | September 24, 2008 at 09:13 AM

Looking for any information about Frances Griffin on the corner of Avenue E and Gulf Shores.

Also, does anyone know any information about the crew at Tiki Bar and Restaurant ? Were they able to get out?

Please email me with any information at HNiscavits@rohmhaas.com

Posted by: Hank Niscavits | September 24, 2008 at 10:25 AM

We had a house on Shady Lane next to Copacabana subdivision. We are wondering about the neighbors two doors to the east, B.E and Billie Wharton at 3012 Copaacabana Drive.

We were down Thursday the 11th boarding up and they were still there and they had just put in a generator?

If anyone knows anything please e-mail taylorm5@swbell.net.

Posted by: Mike Taylor | September 24, 2008 at 11:20 AM

Has anyone heard from Jack and Kathy Morse, they lived at 142 Bud in Crystal Beach. I haven't seen Jack in years but still concerned if him and Kathy are okay. Thanks in advance

Posted by: Linda in Mesquite | September 24, 2008 at 11:21 AM

Looking for Jim & Judy Choate from Gilchrist. Both our homes are gone, but I found something in the debris that belongs to them.
Colleen and Chuck

Posted by: Colleen | September 24, 2008 at 11:25 AM

We are looking for Jerry and Pat Mathis. They live on Crystal Beach and we think that Pat owns a liquor stores there. We talked to Jerry Thursday before the storm. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Email is stephlarrytudor@yahoo.com or my cell is 713-289-4658.

Larry and Stephanie

Posted by: Larry and Stephanie Tudor | September 24, 2008 at 11:33 AM

Has anyone heard from Tommy Comeaux?

Posted by: Beth | September 24, 2008 at 11:41 AM

Looking to see if anyone has heard from Ramiro Tovar and his family? He owned Ram T Construction.

If anyone knows anything please e-mail taylorm5@swbell.net.

Posted by: Mike Taylor | September 24, 2008 at 12:05 PM

Has anyone heard form Tommy Comeaux or Malcolm? Also have you heard from Todd Kahla and family? Todd drove the ferry boat.

Posted by: Michele | September 24, 2008 at 01:41 PM

Beth Rankin is fine. I saw the inquiry about her and called her cell. She is in Dallas at a FEMA hotel. Says she will be coming back.

Posted by: Rebecca Gantert | September 24, 2008 at 02:29 PM

Has anyone hear from Charlie and Ferrylyn Arnold. They live in Port Bolivar and had a small shrimping business. Ferrylyn is employed by American National Insurance in Galveston.

We have been dear friends for over 20 years. We would just like to know that they are okay.

Please send me an email at hallbj@bp.com or call me at 281-366-6708.

Our thoughts and prayer are will all of you.

Alfred & Brendalyn Hall
Sealy, Texas
281-366-6708 (work); 281-687-1244 (cell); 979-885-2495 (home)

Posted by: Alfred & Brendalyn Hall | September 24, 2008 at 02:30 PM

There is a website with 1400 actual photos taking of Bolivar on the 18th. madnonnie.com Look for Crystal Beach Photos

Posted by: Rebecca Gantert | September 24, 2008 at 02:33 PM

Johnny & Vickie Tucker - please call me. I have been worried sick about you and so glad you both are ok. (409) 945-9957

Posted by: Sharon Cornett | September 24, 2008 at 03:21 PM

Does anyone know if Bob from Bobs Sports Bar on Crystal Beach made it out o.k., and where they are at, and also his wife Colleen? Please call Donald at 832-640-9840

Posted by: donald smith | September 24, 2008 at 04:21 PM

I am looking for Anne Dean from yucca st in Bolivar.
Please her to call Marion

Posted by: Jane Filaroska | September 24, 2008 at 04:29 PM

Joe and I are concerned about all we knew on the pennisula,your in our prayers.. Has anyone heard from Bill & Marion Davis on Kahla St.?

Posted by: Janice Jackson | September 24, 2008 at 05:57 PM

Looking for Bob (Buster) and Lynn Helfrich of 706 Salt Cedar Ln. On Point Bolivar.

for link to KHOU blog click here

McCain and the Savings & Loan Disaster of 1989

from the Huffington Post

Open Scholarships to Undocumented Students Petition

Read the following petition and sign the petition if you agree. Why? I have always
wondered why, if HSF is one of the largest funds out there giving to Latino students and they still refuse to give scholarships to undocumented students.

Something to really think about.

Dear Teachers and Community Members,

The Association of Raza Educators believes that all students should have the right to attend college regardless of their citizenship status. Unfortunately, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) does not feel the same way.

Fact--In 2008, HSF gave more money to Hispanic students than any other organization.

Fact--HSF refuses to allow undocumented students to apply to their scholarship even though it is lawful for them to do so.


Over the past two years, the Association of Raza Educators has raised $30,000 in scholarships for undocumented students, but we understand that this is just a small fraction of the financial support that undocumented students really need. Please support ARE in our campaign to ensure that all students receive an equal opportunity to attend college.

Signing the online petition below, will send a clear message to HSF that it is wrong to discriminate against undocumented students.

Please sign the online petition below.

VIEW AND SIGN PETITION

Image

Extortion by Telephone -Virtual Kidnapping

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'Virtual kidnappers' target immigrant families'
By JACQUES BILLEAUD Associated Press Writer 

Houston Chronicle

© 2008 The Associated Press

Sept. 24, 2008, 12:59PM

PHOENIX — Families of illegal immigrants in Arizona are increasingly being targeted by an extortion scam in which criminals falsely claim to have kidnapped their loved ones as the immigrants tried to sneak across the U.S. border with Mexico.

The culprits behind so-called "virtual kidnappings" typically strike when illegal immigrants make the three- to four-day journey through the remote desert, where they are cut off from communicating with family members. Relatives are told to cough up thousands of dollars or their loved ones will be maimed or killed.

"It's just an extension of what happens in Mexico," said Armando Garcia, assistant special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona, where the trend first appeared five years ago and has escalated to an average of one case being reported each week.

Investigators believe virtual kidnappers get the names and phone numbers of immigrants' families either by buying them from smugglers or by posing as helpers who can connect illegal immigrants with smugglers in Mexican border towns.

One family paid $7,000 before calling authorities about the scam. Once a ransom is paid, the criminals will often ask for more money and sometimes even demand that families cover the cost of the kidnapper's cell phone.

The kidnappers are convincing. They speak good English and use cell phones with a Phoenix area code so it looks like they are in the Arizona capital, even though they are probably making the calls from Mexico, where the extortion money is often sent.

Virtual abductions have also been reported in San Diego, where immigration agents investigate two to three each year, said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for that city's office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It's not hard to trick families into believing an actual kidnapping has happened.

Relatives of illegal immigrants know that human trafficking is a violent business in which customers who have already paid their smuggling fees are sometimes held captive while smugglers try to squeeze more money out of friends and family...

A telltale sign of virtual kidnappings is an unwillingness of the scammers to put the supposed abduction victim on the phone. Smugglers who are really holding someone hostage will often let family members speak to the relative.

Immigration agents recommend being skeptical of ransom demands if the caller does not allow relatives to speak with family members who are supposedly being held captive...

for complete article click here

Obama hung in effigy at a good Christian school

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Sep 24, 6:43 PM EDT

Obama effigy found hanging from Ore. campus tree

By MARY HUDETZ
Associated Press writer
Galveston County Daily News

NEWBERG, Ore. (AP) -- Officials of a small Christian university say a life-size cardboard reproduction of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was hung from a tree on the campus, an act with racial undertones that outraged students and school leaders alike.

George Fox University President Robin Baker said a custodian discovered the effigy early Tuesday and removed it. University spokesman Rob Felton said Wednesday that the commercially produced reproduction had been suspended from the branch of a tree with fishing line around the neck...

for complete AP/Galveston County News article click here

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

Today I'm at the newly remodeled Central Library in Downtown Houston. I'm here because there is free parking this week and I love the third floor views our of city. I came across a display with books in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and I checked out as few including a Santana CD. Anyhow one of the books is about "El Dia del Muerto-Day of the Dead" another was about the Pachuco Lingo and Lifestyle...I just wanted to remind everyone that it is a month to celebrate, eventhough like everyone says, "we should celebrate our heritage all the time," right?

What are you doing to celebrate your heritage?

McCain as one of the Keating Five

Obama may not be perfect - but he didn't bring down the U.S. Savings & Loan industry in the 1980s.

Read below about the Keating Five - then watch the video

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The Washington Post
November 19, 1989, Sunday, Final Edition
The Lincoln Mess: Let's Say Goodbye To Keating Five
BYLINE: HOBART ROWEN
SECTION: FINANCIAL; PAGE H1

"Everybody does it, it's legal, that's the way the system works." That's the defense for Sens. Dennis DeConcini and John McCain of Arizona; Alan Cranston of California; John Glenn of Ohio; and Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan, who are accused of pressuring a federal regulator to go easy on Charles H. Keating Jr., a constituent who had raised $ 1.3 million in campaign funds for them.

The regulator, former Federal Home Loan Bank Board chairman Edwin Gray, contends that two 1987 meetings to which he and his colleagues were summoned by the Keating Five were "exercises in naked political power on behalf of a major political contributor."

What these five experienced legislators (two one-time presidential hopefuls and one chairman of the Senate Banking Committee among them) did may not have been technically illegal, but ethically, it stank to high heaven.

If there were true justice in the world, all would be forced to resign their Senate seats. Unless further unsavory details emerge, that's not likely to happen because too many of their colleagues have been similarly (if not equally) guilty in the past. But the Senate Ethics Committee is planning a formal investigation of the five senators to determine whether their intervention on Keating's behalf may have delayed the government's takeover of Lincoln. In the end, voters in their respective four states -- where Keating has extensive financial interests -- can and should dump them at the first opportunity.

In the true sense of the word, their services were bought by Keating, an Arizona land developer who acquired the California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bank board's San Francisco office had begun an investigation in 1986 that convinced it the S&L was indulging in wild, speculative ventures and that it needed to be sharply restrained.

Since then -- and despite the Keating Five's intervention -- Lincoln Savings has gone belly-up, and the failure will cost taxpayers about $ 2.5 billion, making it the single biggest bust of the whole dreadful savings and loan scandal...

In the wake of all the bad publicity, DeConcini and Riegle have by now returned some of Keating's money, but they argue they made only routine and unobjectionable representations for Keating. Glenn and Cranston have stonewalled reporters' inquiries. McCain has sounded contrite: On one occasion, he weakly noted that he had been a senator for only three months by April 1987. That won't wash, even for a war hero.

The Keating Five should go.

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Michael Moore to college students: Register to Vote!

Trailer to "Slacker Uprising"

Michael Moore has done us a great service by producing a movie that encourages young people to register to vote.  Yes, he is clearly pushing for the Democrats, but so what!  At least people will vote - aren't a good number of movies; newscasts; newspaper articles  bent towards the Republicans (please!).  The writer below Neely Tucker is clearly angry at Moore, I wonder if she is being paid by the Republicans.

The title of her article is also misleading -- she says he is attempting to stir an uprising.  I don't think so....  the word "uprising" in her title connotes something bad and violent.  He is not doing that, he is only wanting people to vote....  

Yes, yes I know he uses it in his title too- but using the word Slacker - throws off the meaning. -- why didn't Tucker clarify in her title that the uprising is about voter registration?  He couldn't do that in the title of the movie (wouldn't sound right), but you know how movie titles have to grab you...

She doesn't need to grab us with her title.  Enough people hate Michael Moore for his name to suffice.  But we at dreamacttexas assure Ms. Tucker that Moore is not staging an uprising... he is just wanting to for people to have a voice.

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Michael Moore attempts to stir uprising online
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2008; Page C07
Not playing at a theater near you: Michael Moore's new rabble-rousing documentary, "Slacker Uprising," which debuted yesterday on the Internet ( http://www.slackeruprising.com) as a downloadable freebie.

The 97-minute flick, as subtle as a sledgehammer, is Moore's account of his barnstorming tour of the country in advance of the 2004 presidential election, an effort undertaken to "save John Kerry and the Democrats from themselves." Its message to Democrats in 2008 -- implicit, but screamingly so -- is, don't let this happen again.

His loathing of President Bush already documented in "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore went to 62 cities in 20 battleground states in five weeks, attempting to register as many young voters -- i.e., slackers -- as possible. In Michigan, he offered his college-age crowd ramen noodles or a pair of "fresh underwear" if they registered, a comedic stunt that the state Republican Party tried to halt via legal action.

In other places, Republican supporters attempted to bar him from the local college campus, or offered student organizations large sums of money to cancel his speeches -- opposition that, of course, helps gin up a little drama for the story Moore tells here. At various rallies, Steve Earle shows up to sing, as do Eddie Vedder and Joan Baez.

This is no appeal to Republicans to cross lines, or a reasoned missive to undecided voters. It's a series of Democratic pep rallies, railing at the Bush administration. The music is great and the pace is often energetic, but Moore the speaker is not nearly as entertaining as Moore the filmmaker, which he seems to intuit in the editing. There are dozens of shots of him taking the podium, but only snippets of his talks, largely because his message can be fairly summed up as: Throw the bums out. Also, blame the media.

The best moment belongs to a little boy in a crowd of Bush supporters heckling one rally. Spotting the camera, the kid bellows: "Michael Moore sucks!"

Special Issue on Plyler v Doe: DREAMers at the forefront

The Special issue on Plyler V. Doe and the education of undocumented students is out today from the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy.

Below: Left Out But Not Shut Down: Political Activism and the Undocumented Student Movement by: Roberto G. Gonzales

4Gonzales - Upload a Document to Scribd

Latinos looking up to the Chinese

I can say so much about this article, for example, I wish my parents would have pushed me "just a-little-bit" more, but they both had to work long-hard hours to keep us out the Food Stamp stereotype. I know my parents wanted the best for me and that is why in my case migrated to Texas, but for newcomers it is always difficult than an established generation of Rodriguezes'. It is my generation who will think like the Chinese and push our kids to excell in all subjects, It is I that will make my kids learn Chinese early-on, as it will be becoming very popular.

Another though would be Why isn't there a system like this for Latinos? If almost the same stereotypes affect us why do Latinos get left behind? Is it because we allow it or because we don't like to see other Latinos succeed?

It is true that one person can make a difference in your life, so imagine a whole "village." I also notice that in the library I am sitting-in, which is in the heart of Magnolia, consists of families and not just kids by themselves, even parents are reading. So that must say something good about this community.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A new school of thought
Chinese schools attract more than just Asian kids fighting stereotype
By Holly Yan and Stella M Chavez
The Dallas Morning News,
September 21, 2008

If such a thing as positive racial profiling existed, Asian students would be the target. The stereotype is rampant: Asian-American kids portrayed as relentless bookworms who work harder and make better grades than their peers in other ethnic groups.

But the stereotype blurs the reality of what life is like for children whose parents expect them to attend 'Chinese school' on Saturday or Sunday after a five-day week in public school. Go to Web pages such as 'Asian Parents Are Too Crazy About Grades' and you'll hear the continuing debate over academic performance and what some students see as excruciating pressure to excel.

Chinese schools, little known outside of Asian communities, have become incubators of academic excellence. And they are attracting the attention of white, Hispanic and black parents who want the best for their children. Ray Wei, principal of one Dallas-area Chinese school, sets the bar high for his students. 'They should be better than their teacher,' he says.

Numbers often tell the story of Asian students' performance. In 2007, 32 percent of Asian students earned 'commended' status on all subjects of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Only 13 percent of all Texas students taking TAKS tests got the commended label in all subjects. Same story on the SAT, the college entrance exam. And a disproportionately high number of valedictorians last year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area had Asian surnames.

Mr. Wei, who runs the Dallas Chinese School in Richardson, attributes his students' success to hard work and discipline. But the key, he says, is their commitment to weekend classes at Chinese school. The school is just off Central Expressway near a church and Richardson City Hall. On the first day of class, the 10-classroom building buzzes with excited parents, students and staff. Children ranging in grade levels from pre-kindergarten to high school take classes such as phonics, modern Chinese language, PSAT/SAT preparation and calculus.

Several reading and writing classes are available for different grade levels. Students can take one class or a few. As he walks the hallways, Mr. Wei proudly shows off the achievements of his alumni. Lining the walls are pictures, diplomas and newspaper articles celebrating former students who've gone on to bigger and better things. Mr. Wei knows each and every story. This person scored perfectly on his SAT.

That person got into MIT. 'This poor guy applied to Yale and Harvard but ended up going to Stanford as a backup,' he jokes. About 80 percent of his students end up as pre-med or pre-law students in college, Mr. Wei says. The rest focus on engineering.

Dallas Chinese School has been operating for more than two decades. It's one of at least eight such schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. History, heritage The earliest known Chinese schools opened on the West Coast in the late 19th century, when Chinese students were banned from public schools because of their ethnicity. Back then, the schools mostly tried to preserve Chinese language and cultural heritage.

To view the complete article click here.

I'm back, but still with no POWER!

Although my thoughts are a bit overdue, I wanted to share this experience.We had to make the best of the situation, but it was the scariest night in my life...Over 5 hours of strong winds, water and trees falling.
This is a picture take right infront of my house, about 6am with wind gusts of about 45MPH.


The first day my family and I were in aww...we walked through neighborhood and saw trees uprooted, power-lines on the ground, cars under trees, houses destroyed. I was afraid our chimney was going to cave in or our roof and into our living area, the windows rattled all night long...Our beautiful trees suffered some damaged and one just timbered right over the driveway, where hours before two cars were parked but decided to move to a friends garage. The first two days we waited in line an hour for ICE and WATER at Ripley House of off Navigation Blvd. The third day I waited in line 5-hours, even Mayor Bill White was upset for having us wait so long. I almost got out of line to go to the restroom, luckily a friend drove by and stayed in my car while I went to the corner gas-station.
As of today it has been 1-week and four days without POWER. Boy do we miss our news, novelas and wrestling shows and of course BLOGGING.
It is almost back to normal, we are lucky to have our house, have great health, and spend quality time with my family and friends.
I just hope that my in-law's house located two blocks away from the SEAWALL in Galveston is okay, they still have not visited the island and are anxious to clean out their refrigerator.
God Bless all the families who were affected by the hurricane.
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John McCain: It's OK to be undocumented if you are Irish

So is it a color thing for McCain?

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McCain Bemoans Fate of Undocumented Irish in America
By Robert Barnes

Washington Post
SCRANTON, Pa. -- An issue that has been largely missing from the English-language presidential debate recently -- immigration reform -- made a brief return here this morning when Republican John McCain addressed a largely Irish-American crowd.

McCain said there were "50,000 Irish men and women in this country illegally who want to become citizens'' and that "we have to give them a path to citizenship."

McCain was a leader of the failed effort in Congress last year to overhaul the nation's immigration policies, and told the audience that it was an example of his willingness to take on controversial issues despite the political costs -- a point McCain has been making of late in ads playing on Spanish-language radio stations in key states, but by and large eschewed before non-Hispanic audiences.

"It didn't make me the most popular member of my own party and it almost cost me the nomination of my party," McCain said.

McCain said it also showed he had a willingness to reach across the aisle to form common ground -- he specifically mentioned Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a hero in the Irish community -- which he said Democratic rival Barack Obama did not possess.

"To preserve that fragile coalition, I had to sometime take votes which were not popular," McCain said. "Senator Kennedy took votes that were not popular. Senator Obama took a hike."

McCain said he wanted to see tighter border security, a more highly regulated temporary worker program with penalties for companies that hire illegal workers and also a way for those here illegally to become citizens, although not ahead of those who have played by the existing rules.

"This nation is all the stronger -- this nation is stronger, this nation is stronger -- for the infusion of fresh blood and vitality that has come to this nation wave after wave: Irish, Italian, Poles, everybody who's come to this nation has enriched our nation, including our Hispanic citizenry. OK? That's what America's all about."

Still, immigration reform is not something that McCain often mentions as a priority, unless the subject is something of particular interest to his audience, or he is asked about it.

Posted at 2:15 PM ET on Sep 22, 2008

Bill Clinton is at it again: - positive thoughts on Sarah Palin

The talk has been that the Clintons didn't want Kerry to win so that Hillary could run in 2008.  Now Bill is working on Obama not winning... making it easier for Hillary's  in 2012.  As much as so many Democrats find Palin abominable, Bill thinks she is ok - doesn't think anyone should say bad things about her.  Guess he doesn't feel this way about Obama...

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September 23, 2008
Bill Clinton Says Americans Can Relate to the Palin Family

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bill Clinton said Monday that he understood why Gov. Sarah Palin is popular in the heartland: people relate to her.

“I come from Arkansas; I get why she’s hot out there,” Mr. Clinton said. “Why she’s doing well.”

Speaking to reporters before his Clinton Global Initiative meeting, Mr. Clinton described Ms. Palin’s appeal by saying, “People look at her, and they say: ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’ ”

Mr. Clinton said voters would think: “I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They’re wonderful children. They’re wonderful people. And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy...”

“I get this,” Mr. Clinton said. “My view is, why say, ever, anything bad about a person? Why don’t we like them and celebrate them and be happy for her elevation to the ticket? And just say that she was a good choice for him and we disagree with them?...”

for link to complete AP/NYT article click here

McCain goes back a few centuries

While in Paris last summer, my husband really wanted to see the Bastille - you know, that place where lots of people lost their heads - it is the place where the guillotine became famous...

Anyway, we hadn't looked at our tourist books well enough to know the place had been demolished.  So we walked across downtown Paris, looking for the place of doom.  When we found the location, it was just a concrete plaza with some benches.  We sat down a while to take a break before heading back ---  there were a few people around, looking kind of somber.

But I swear to you, the place had a heavy, nasty feeling to it.  The bad energy was still there... even if you aren't into New Age stuff, you have to agree that places where thousands of people were killed have to leave behind some kind of negative energy.

Anyway -- after reading George Will's essay, I wonder if McCain was Robespierre in a previous life...

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McCain Loses His Head
By George F. Will

Washington Post
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; A21

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."

-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and the New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

georgewill@washpost.com

..
link to image of John McCain
link to image of Robespierre

La Americana

For more information, visit: http://www.la-americana.com/

Chicago Targeted by ICE

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200 Arrested in Immigration Raids
Democracy Now

September 22, 3008

Federal agents have arrested at least 200 people in immigration raids in Illinois, Indiana, Colorado and California over the past week. Most of the arrests took place in the Chicago area and northern Indiana. Beginning on Sept. 12, four ICE Fugitive Operations teams detained and arrested 144 people in nineteen towns in the region. Fifty-nine more immigrants were arrested in Colorado, where agents conducted raids in fourteen cities. In California, agents arrested twenty-one undocumented immigrants working at a chain of Chinese restaurants. Meanwhile, a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center has found that nearly one in ten Latinos in the United States reported that in the last year police or other authorities stopped them and asked them about their immigration status. Last year, ICE agents arrested more than 35,000 undocumented immigrants—more than double the number in 2006.

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144 illegal immigrants arrested
Associated Press/Chicago Tribune
6:24 PM CDT, September 17, 2008
CHICAGO - Federal agents have arrested 144 illegal immigrants in a series of sweeps in the Chicago area and northern Indiana.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced the arrests Wednesday. The raids targeted 110 undocumented immigrants who failed to appear for hearings or were ordered by a judge to leave the country. ICE arrested the other 34 illegal immigrants during the sweeps that began on Friday and ended Monday.

This brings the total number of illegal immigrants the Chicago ICE office arrested since last October to 1,597.

One of the largest immigrant rights groups in the state is condemning the sweeps.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights claims the arrests separate families and unfairly target immigrants.

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15 arrested in crackdown on Chicago fake ID ring
By MIKE ROBINSON | AP Legal Affairs Writer
1:15 PM CDT, September 19, 2008
CHICAGO - Federal agents said Friday that they've arrested 15 alleged members of a bogus documents ring and are searching for six others as part of a renewed crackdown on Chicago's brisk, multimillion-dollar trade in counterfeit identification papers.

Agents fanned out across the city's West Side on Thursday, and by early Friday had arrested two U.S. citizens and 13 Mexican nationals charged in freshly unsealed conspiracy indictments, officials said. They said six of those named in the indictments were still sought by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"This action should send a clear message that ICE and its law enforcement partners will identify those criminal organizations that perpetrate document fraud," said Gary J. Hartwig, special agent in charge of the Chicago ICE office.

The arrest of members of the so-called St. Louis document-selling ring follows a similar crackdown in May 2007 against another bogus identification ring called the Albany Crew.

At a news conference, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald acknowledged that Immigration is a touchy subject. But he said the case was about selling fraudulent documents, not Immigration.

Prosecutors said that the St. Louis ring announced immediately after the Albany arrests that it was open for business and would sell falsified documents.

The ring allegedly sold Social Security cards, so-called "green cards" carried by resident aliens, driver's licenses and state ID cards, officials said.

Prosecutors said the ring included eight to 10 "miqueros," or vendors, who would signal to passing vehicles and pedestrians that false ID papers were available. A full set cost $110 to $150 while a Social Security card alone cost about $40, federal officials said.

They said customers were typically from Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Illinois and Michigan. They sought green cards indicating they were from Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador, El Salvador, Jamaica, Poland, the Czech Republic, Albania, Russia and China, officials said.

Some seeking fake IDs were also believed to be U.S. citizens, they said.

Conspiracy to produce false IDs carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Tensions in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, where Thursday's raids took place, have been high since ICE agents conducted a daytime raid on a shopping mall there last year and arrested dozens of people. At least 22 were charged in a conspiracy to make thousands of fake identification documents like social security cards; several people have been deported in the case.

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Immigration Roller Coaster for McCain

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McCain zigzags on immigration
By: Gebe Martinez
September 17, 2008 04:49 PM EST

POLITICO.COM

Republican presidential nominee John McCain is zigzagging again.

On comprehensive immigration legislation, McCain has not been a “straight-talker,” nor has he been a classic flip-flopper. You know the type: “He was for it before he was against it.” No, McCain has chosen a more twisted path.

Well-known is McCain’s co-sponsorship with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)of the 2006 Senate immigration bill, which proposed combining border security with tougher employer sanctions, temporary worker visas and legalization of about 12 million undocumented immigrants. When Republican voters protested in 2007, McCain backed away from the measure, calling for “border security first.”

Then, a few weeks ago, he asked Latino community leaders to “trust” him on the immigration issue and uttered “comprehensive” — as in “one bill” — for the first time in months. But then came a hard right turn at the Republican National Convention, when the party adopted a conservative platform that rejected McCain’s support for the comprehensive measure. The language was a far cry from what Karl Rove negotiated for President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

A few days ago, in what was clearly an insult to anyone who participated or watched the Senate immigration debates, McCain issued a Spanish-language ad that wrongly blamed his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, and fellow Democrats for blocking approval of the Senate’s broad immigration bill. But the bill fell when only 12 of the 49 Senate Republicans supported it.

The ad is jaw-dropping stuff. It contends Obama is “not ready to lead” because he introduced and voted for “poison pill” amendments — language that, if approved, would have undermined the delicately negotiated bipartisan bill, which Obama supported. As opposed to McCain, who turned the bill over to the White House and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) so that he could go to the campaign trail, abandon his full-throated support of his own measure and talk about border security first?

The ad targeted Latino voters in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, leaving Latino political leaders disappointed, frustrated and confused by the zigzagging.

They question McCain’s ability to lead on immigration as president if he cannot stand up to his party conservatives as a candidate.

“Having worked with Sen. McCain for a long time [on comprehensive immigration reform], I truly believe he’s a firm believer on this issue,” said Cecilia Munoz, vice president of National Council of La Raza, the civil rights group that hosted McCain this summer when he appealed for trust and understanding. However, she added, “the fact that the [GOP] platform turned out so differently than Sen. McCain’s position has confused some people as to whether or not he can deliver his party.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-comprehensive immigration group, is less sanguine. He said conservatives have remained steadfast in their opposition to visa expansions and other parts of the bill, favoring only tough enforcement such as the recent immigration raids that rounded up hundreds of suspected illegal immigrant workers, separated families and instilled fear.

“We may never move legislation even if ‘President’ McCain wants to move the legislation,” Sharry said. Expecting a better outcome after his rhetorical shifts to the right “is like giving an alcoholic a drink and hoping they get sober tomorrow.”

The fear among Latinos is palpable. Harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric often makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants or between native-born and foreign-born Latinos. While the issue is not the top concern of Latino voters, according to public polls, it is a “threshold” issue that separates “who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” Munoz said.

A survey conducted last month in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida for NDN, a progressive group, showed two-thirds of all voters and at least 73 percent of Hispanic voters supporting the broad immigration plan. Republicans fared poorly on their handling of the issue in the poll that was conducted in the days before McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate — a choice that wowed conservatives but leaves a question mark on the immigration issue.

In reaching out to Latino voters, McCain has highlighted his serious, decades-long work on behalf of Hispanics with hopes of overcoming the negative Republican brand. But the party’s tough stance on immigration has hurt McCain. “I think the die is cast when it comes to the immigration issue,” said NDN’s pollster, Sergio Bendixen.

Obviously, McCain tries to sound tough on immigration to avoid further angering his party’s conservative base. With the national media paying scant attention to the issue — a situation that should end when the debates begin — McCain has rarely been called out for playing to both sides.

The closest McCain and Obama came recently to exchanging immigration views occurred last week.

McCain’s campaign released a letter to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute that explained his last-minute decision not to attend their gala. The letter foreshadowed the attack about to be released in his Spanish-language ad.

“My efforts were stymied by ideologues in both parties, including my opponent, who voted five separate times for poison pills by special interests to kill immigration reform, votes that Sen. Kennedy and I opposed,” McCain stated. “I will first convince the American people that we can secure our borders. I will then work to enact a practical and fair immigration policy, one that ensures respect for the laws of this country, recognizes the important economic contribution of immigrant laborers, apprehends those who came here illegally to commit crimes, and deals practically and humanely with those who came here to build a better, safer life for their families, without excusing the fact that they came here illegally.”

Later, Obama reaffirmed his support for the immigration bill and struck back: “You’ve got to ask yourself: If Sen. McCain won’t stand up to opponents of reform at his own convention, how can you trust him to stand up for change in Washington?”

Obama told the 2,300-member, bipartisan audience, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for a president who won’t walk away from comprehensive immigration reform when it becomes politically unpopular.”

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said McCain should have shown up because the Latino vote will matter this year. “He gave in on the Republican platform,” said Menendez. “He certainly has, in my mind, abandoned the [Latino] community.”

If Menendez is wrong, McCain can clear up the ongoing confusion by answering the question posed in his campaign ad: “Which side are they on?”

Gebe Martinez is a longtime journalist in Washington and a frequent lecturer and commentator on the policy and politics of Capitol Hill.

© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

Immigrant Workers and Post IKE

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chicagotribune.com
September 22, 2008

Immigration debate takes back seat as Southeast Texas looks to Latinos in rebuilding from Ike

By MONICA RHOR and PETER PRENGAMAN

Associated Press Writers
PASADENA, Texas (AP) _ All along the Texas coast, Latino immigrants are hauling away fallen trees, slashing through storm-tangled brush, patching punctured roofs.

On working-class corners, on ladders in front of Victorian houses, in the yards of ornate mansions, crews of men in dusty jeans, sturdy workboots and baseball caps are nearly as omnipresent in the post-Hurricane Ike landscape as blue tarps on rooftops.

These workers, who get picked up off the street by homeowners looking for quick, cheap labor, are helping to rebuild the devastated cities of southeast Texas.

Many of them are here illegally. Others are legal residents in need of income after their regular jobs were disrupted by the hurricane.

Ike brought a wide swath of destruction, and with it the prospect of more work, higher wages and a respite from the ever-present threat of deportation. In recent months, many day laborers say, jobs in the Houston area had started to dry up, and police and immigration officials had been cracking down.

"There's more work now," Teodoro Alvarado, 20, said Friday in Spanish as he stood on a corner in the gritty Houston suburb of Pasadena where day laborers regularly wait for work. "And I hope more work comes."

There's reason to believe it will: After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of Latino immigrants streamed to New Orleans for jobs in construction, carpentry and cleanup.

Since Ike struck Sept. 13, Gerardo Hernandez has been getting jobs lifting trees off driveways and houses, but he usually works as a roofer. A drive through the quaint bayside community of Kemah, where the hurricane lifted the roofs off dozens of boardwalk restaurants and private homes, made him confident there'd be need for his services.

"In the weeks that come, as people get insurance money, I think there will be more work," Hernandez, a Mexican immigrant who has been in this country four years, said in Spanish.

Along with the promise of fresh jobs, there are fears of abuse and exploitation of workers, and rumors that immigration officials will be poised at job sites to arrest the undocumented. After Katrina, many Latino workers in New Orleans reported cases of unsafe working conditions and employers who cheated them out of money earned.

"These people are going to be getting work, but they will also be the most exploited," said Annica Gorham, director of the Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center, which helps day laborers who have been cheated of wages, injured on the job or working in unsafe conditions. "Day laborers are some of the most vulnerable workers here and across the county."

In Houston, as in dozens of other U.S. cities, several police departments in the area have started to turn over undocumented immigrants for deportation. There have also been highly publicized workplace raids by federal agents, including one in June where 160 workers at a cluttered rag factory were arrested.

But this city's immigrants, who help make up the country's second-largest population of day laborers after that of Los Angeles, also provide a ready-made work force for the massive cleanup and rebuilding efforts.

"There are plenty of people asking for help," said Marco Ramirez, 50, a contractor who normally has a five-man crew. Since Ike, Ramirez has had to hire extra workers and will likely need more. All, including Ramirez, are Latino immigrants.

"The immigrant people, the Latinos, are the ones who really do the job," said Ramirez, who spoke outside a sprawling home where his men were using chain saws and chains to cut through fallen trees and splintered branches. "We are going to put the city back together."

Even in Houston, a city long known as friendly toward undocumented immigrants, many people see the use of such workers as nothing more than a shortcut around the country's labor laws.

In the storm's aftermath, however, Mayor Bill White said homeowners need to find help where they can.

"I like to see people doing it, rather than letting debris pile up and people not getting roofs fixed," said White, who has a reputation for welcoming immigrants.

Early on most mornings last week, many of the more than two dozen spots in Houston where day laborers gather had been swept clean by contractors and homeowners looking for workers. Most are paid about $8 to $10 an hour to install wallboard, clear driveways and yards, or repair roofs. So far, workers said, wages had not increased much from pre-Ike rates.

At a Home Depot in southeast Houston, where as many as 100 day laborers gathered well before dawn Friday to wait for work, dozens of men from Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador stood on the periphery of a parking lot.

Every few minutes, the drivers of cars, pickup trucks and SUVs would pull up and signal to the waiting men. It took mere seconds for the workers to converge on a vehicle, negotiate a price and jump inside.

The men left behind were both encouraged by the signs of burgeoning work and worried about the possibility of dishonest employers and immigration roundups.

"We're just looking for steady work to support our families," 45-year-old Antonio Velasquez, whose wife and nine children remain in El Salvador, said in Spanish.

When things are going well, Velasquez sends his family $500 a month. Lately, he barely has enough to cover his own expenses.

Velasquez protects himself from wage theft by only working for employers who pay at the end of the day.

"Un dia trabajado es un dia pagado," he said, quoting a refrain often used by day laborers: A day's pay for a day's work.

Stories of widespread employer abuse and wage theft following Katrina have left immigrants wary of accepting long-term jobs in other locations.

On Friday morning, the driver of a bus looking for a crew to work for a week in the Galveston area, saying the pay would come at week's end. He got few takers.

"They need us, but they also take advantage of us," said Alex Yovani, 26, a Honduran immigrant who also worked in Louisiana after Katrina. "Without us, how would they build Houston again? Without the work of our hands, there would be no way to move forward."

As Yovani spoke, homeowner Dale Emion eased his pickup close to the circle of men. It was immediately surrounded by over a dozen day laborers.

"I need two and will pay $7 an hour to clean up around my house," Emion said.

"You gonna give lunch?" asked one man in broken English.

Emion shook his head. No one got in the truck, but the men didn't walk away, either.

"OK. I'll pay $8," said Emion.

Two men got in the cab of the truck.

"I just need them to clean up my house," Emion said. "Where else am I going to find workers?"

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Democracy Now: On Dick Cheney

Barton Gellman, a well respected journalist has published a book on the Cheney Vice-Presidency that documents Cheney's powerful and destructive role.  Maybe the publication of the book has something to do with the subpoena ordering Cheney to save his papers...

see related dreamacttexas post:  "Someone Finally Pointing to Cheney,"  September 20, 2008

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Democracy Now

September 19, 2008

link to mp3 download of Democracy Now interview on Cheney


Book: Cheney’s Drive for Warrantless Spying Nearly Brought Down Bush Presidency


Transcript of Interview

We speak to award-winning journalist Barton Gellman about his new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Gellman reveals Cheney played a crucial role in maintaining warrantless spying even after Justice Department officials began to doubt its legality in 2004. Gellman writes: “The history of the Bush administration cannot be written without close attention to the moments when Cheney took the helm—sometimes at Bush’s direction, sometimes with his tacit consent, and sometimes without the president’s apparent awareness.” 


Barton Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. He is a special projects reporter at the Washington Post. His Cheney series, with partner Jo Becker, won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday against the National Security Agency, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, challenging the legality of the administration’s electronic surveillance program. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of all residential AT&T customers and alleges that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance on US residents in violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

A new book by award-winning journalist Barton Gellman reveals that the Vice President played a crucial role in maintaining this program of warrantless spying, even after Justice department officials began to doubt its legality in 2004. The book is called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

AMY GOODMAN: With less than two months to go before the election, the media’s attention has been on the recently confirmed vice-presidential nominees Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. But after nearly eight years in office, how much do we know about our current vice president?

According to Gellman, there’s quite a bit we’ve all been kept in the dark about, right from the decision to select Cheney as Bush’s running mate to winning congressional approval for war on Iraq and the administration’s illegal wiretapping program.

Gellman writes, “The history of the Bush administration cannot be written without close attention to the moments when Cheney took the helm—sometimes at Bush’s direction, sometimes with his tacit consent, and sometimes without the president’s apparent awareness.” Cheney’s “indifference to public opinion,” Gellman writes, “verged on contempt.”

Barton Gellman, the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, joins us here in our firehouse studio. He’s special projects reporter for the Washington Post. His series on Cheney for the Post, written with partner Jo Becker, won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

BARTON GELLMAN: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you know, the McCain campaign threatened to sue the National Enquirer over a story they had on Sarah Palin, and the response of the National Enquirer was, you know, we’ve investigated—I don’t if they said—we’ve investigated her for a few weeks—this was just after her candidacy was announced—which is more than we can say for you, they said to the McCain campaign, in vetting her for vice president.

Well, let’s go back to the current vice president and how he was chosen. Wasn’t he in charge of the vice-presidential pick for George Bush?

BARTON GELLMAN: Yeah, well, everyone knows that Bush asked Dick Cheney to manage and oversee the vice-presidential selection process, and there have been jokes for years about how he selected himself. And honestly, that’s not true. Bush did choose him.

But the process made for an interesting contrast to Sarah Palin’s. Dick Cheney oversaw the most probing, most intrusive vetting of potential vice presidents that I think there’s ever been. He had, for sure, the longest questionnaire, questions that went to as bald as: is there something that could be used to blackmail you, and if so, what? But he was looking for direct access. He insisted that the candidates sign waivers allowing him complete access to their medical and psychiatric records, FBI files, financial files, IRS returns, and so on.

Now, to a substantial degree, that’s appropriate. You don’t want to have a blackmailable vice president and potential commander-in-chief. The tricky thing is that when they pulled the switch and when Dick Cheney became the President’s choice or the candidate’s choice, he did not go through the same vetting process. He did not fill out his own questionnaire, which is contrary to what the campaign said at the time. He did not turn over even most of his public documents, old speeches and testimony and so forth. Halliburton would not cooperate with financial inquiries. And the cardiac surgeon, an eminent, famous surgeon, who was brought out by the campaign to vouch for Cheney’s heart health, says in an on-the-record interview in the book that he never actually met Cheney or reviewed his medical records.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And it is amazing, as you point out, that even for top security clearance most people are only required to go back about seven years in their history; he wanted an entire life—every speech that any potential vice-presidential candidate had made, anything they had said. And yet, he doesn’t do it for himself. So it’s almost as if Palin is not the first person who hasn’t been thoroughly vetted before being chosen as a vice-presidential candidate.

BARTON GELLMAN: Well, look. I mean, in fairness, Dick Cheney had a long record that was pretty well known, and he had been confirmed by the Senate to be Secretary of Defense. He had been scrutinized pretty closely over the years. But even just as a political matter for the benefit of the campaign, his intense desire for secrecy and privacy was harmful, because the Democrats had done a lot more opposition research on Cheney than the campaign had done on him in its own headquarters, and so when they started bringing out his old votes as political lines of attack—you know, against the Martin Luther King holiday or school lunch programs, whatever it was—the campaign didn’t actually know what his votes were.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Vice President Cheney leaking confidential information to discredit a rival?

BARTON GELLMAN: This is an accusation made by one of the short-listed candidates for Bush’s running mate, the governor of Oklahoma right next door, Frank Keating, who was a friend of Bush and someone who was described by the campaign as a finalist. He filled out all the paperwork, and he included in it, when asked, “Is there anything in your record that could potentially embarrass you or the campaign?” he said, “Look, I don’t think this is embarrassing, but I’ll let you know that a friend of mine has paid the college tuition of my kids,” sort of a big gift from someone who did have certain interests in—not to make money for himself, but in a cause before the federal government. And it could be made to look bad. It was sort of on the line enough that Keating asked for an opinion from the Government Ethics Office, and the Ethics Office cleared it.

And a somewhat distorted version of this disclosure got leaked to Newsweek after Cheney was chosen as running mate and while Bush was starting to form a cabinet. Keating was also said to be a leading candidate to be attorney general. And in fact, a bunch of very conservative and influential organizations, like the Federalist Society, were pushing his candidacy. And that was not Cheney’s choice. And, lo and behold, one day Newsweek comes out with this piece of his vetting file, except that Newsweek says he didn’t disclose it.

Frank Keating tells me, for the first time, on the record—and I sort of lay out the story at length in Angler—that he sees no way this could have been produced by anybody but Cheney or his three close aides, who were the only ones who saw the files. He said, “Dick Cheney coming into my life has been like a black cloud.” Now, people with an ax to grind, you have to worry about. He didn’t get a job. He was disappointed. One thing that gave it more credence for me is that another Republican governor, a close friend of Bush who was also said to be a finalist, John Engler of Michigan, told me that he agrees with Frank Keating. He doesn’t see any way it could have leaked without Cheney’s participation.

AMY GOODMAN: And the title of your book, Angler?

BARTON GELLMAN: Cheney’s Secret Service codename. They have a wry sense of humor about the way they give codenames, and a lot of times they have a double meaning. Obviously, Cheney is an avid fisherman. I thought it was a nice metaphor for the way that he works. He tends to approach the levers of power obliquely. He doesn’t like to—like you to see him coming, doesn’t like to have an overt public role. He finds his way to the place where decisions are made and often doesn’t leave many signs of his presence.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this conversation in a moment. Our guest is the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman. His book is just out. It’s called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman. He writes for the Washington Post, and he has written a new book. It’s called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you whether—the extraordinary power of Vice President Dick Cheney has been remarked upon quite often, but I don’t think it’s ever been quite given in such detail, how it developed and accumulated, as you have in this book.

9/11 and the days—the actual day of 9/11 and the days afterwards, and Cheney’s role in that—you go into that quite in detail. If you could talk about some of the especially unusual aspects of the role that he assumed in those days?

BARTON GELLMAN: Well, you had the unfortunate coincidence of the President being, as everyone knows, in a schoolroom reading The Pet Goat to elementary school students when the attacks took place. And they have very good communications for the President, but he was still hard to reach and not in the thick of things. And Dick Cheney just took command.

He was hustled down to the White House bunker, the PEOC, they call it, Presidential Emergency Operations Center. And one intriguing thing to note, from a close look at the record, is that if American Flight 77 had in fact been aiming at the White House, which is what the Secret Service thought when they dragged him double-speed down to the bunker, he would have lost the race: the plane would have struck the White House before he got to the bunker.

Down inside, he was focused very much on sort of the need to direct the cabinet, emergency decision making. There is new reason to doubt the story that he and President Bush said, that when he gave the famous shoot-down order, to say that if there were additional hijacked planes coming towards Washington or anywhere else, that the Air Force had authority to shoot them down. And at the time he gave that order, he believed that there was a plane on the way right now. There’s new reasons to doubt that Bush authorized that in advance. It looks as though the Vice President made that decision on his own and looked for a blessing afterward.

Now, to me, actually, just as a citizen, if the President can’t be reached and a plane is considered to be a couple of minutes from Washington and could strike Congress, which happens to sort of be pretty full at the moment, or the Supreme Court, which happens to be hosting a national conference of federal judges at that moment, I’m not sure I would want him to stand on exact procedure and let the plane come in because the President can’t be reached. What’s troubling here and what’s kind of a precursor to what comes later is that the President and Vice President did not level with us about the way it happened.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in the days after 9/11, the role that he began to assume?

BARTON GELLMAN: Well, even, actually, as of that day, he made an interesting decision. You’re in the middle of an ongoing emergency. There are so many decisions to make about restarting aviation, which has never been shut down in this country; reopening the stock markets; what to say to other countries; what steps to take at the borders. And one of the things that Cheney does is he calls for his lawyer, David Addington. “Please come back down here into the bunker. We have things to talk about.” And as early as the day of 9/11, they were talking together about what new powers the President would require and what legal changes would be required in order to empower the commander-in-chief the way Cheney thought he should be empowered.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the internal struggle within the Bush administration that almost ended Bush’s presidency.

BARTON GELLMAN: It starts just a few days after 9/11, in one sense, because it turns out the Vice President is truly the father of the warrantless domestic surveillance program. He called in Mike Hayden, who was the head of the National Security Agency, and he said, “Tell me what you’re not doing against al-Qaeda that you could be doing.”

And Hayden has this sort of famous, or famous in Washington, briefing device. He draws a Venn diagram with three overlapping ovals: one of them is what they would love to be able to do, one is what they’re technically capable of doing, and one is what’s legal. And what he says is, you know, “Where we work is right in the space where those three ovals intersect.”

And Cheney tells him, “Suppose that third oval wasn’t there. Suppose you were not constrained by the law.” And he is not saying, “Let’s break the law.” He’s saying, “Let’s suppose there were no legal restriction. Then what would you do?” And he does not go in the direction of asking for a change in the law. He presses the interpretation that, as commander-in-chief in wartime and because intelligence gathering is inherent in war, Bush doesn’t have to follow the explicit prohibitions in two felony statutes on warrantless surveillance, that Bush, as commander-in-chief, can simply override those and override them secretly.

And so, fast-forward now something around a little over two years later. December of 2003, the Justice Department starts to become very doubtful that parts of this program are legal. There’s a new guy heading the Office of Legal Counsel, which is sort of like the internal Supreme Court of the executive branch. And he says, “I just can’t back this thing.” And it needs to be certified as legal by the Justice Department every forty-five days. So it’s—there’s a deadline coming up in March of ’04, March 11th. And for three months, Dick Cheney and David Addington are trying to squelch a legal insurgency at Justice, where they’re saying, with increasing intensity, “We can’t go along with this.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you say—you indicate also that it’s not just at Justice, that the inspector general and the chief counsel of the National Security Agency had questions about the program, as well, right?

BARTON GELLMAN: Yeah. I devote two whole chapters to this thing. It’s the longest narrative in the book, because it’s unbelievably—there was so much that’s new here that we didn’t know, and it’s an extraordinary drama.

The first shot of this little revolution, I guess, is that the general counsel—acting general counsel and the inspector general of the National Security Agency, who are essentially the two guys charged with making sure it follows the rules, say, “Well, we’re starting to hear some funny questions from Justice. If you’re not sure this is legal, we better find out more about it. Let’s—we want to come in and read the opinions.” Now, that alone is an amazing question. It’s vanishingly rare to have a major program at an agency about—and the agency doesn’t know what the legal basis is. But they had not been given the opinions.

They show up at Justice for a meeting, and David Addington hears about it, Vice President’s lawyer. He turns up uninvited, and he tells them to go home. “You’re not getting the opinions. This is none of your business.” And he’s a very imposing man. And they left.

So, three months go by. The battle continues. And Dick Cheney does not tell the President for three months. The President does not find out that Justice thinks this thing is illegal and won’t sign until the day before the deadline.

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, this is just a side story, but Cheney has the White House email all blindly going to him, so everyone who writes to each other in the White House, Cheney gets that email?

BARTON GELLMAN: Early on in the administration, he made arrangements that he and his office would be copied with all the significant paperwork in the White House on issues. Now, it was not true that if you wrote to the person in the cubicle next door, he was going to get a blind copy. But if you sent to the working group on Asia or on arms control, you would see that it was going to your colleagues in the White House in the appropriate directorates; you would not see that it was also going to Cheney. And there were people who made the mistake of giving very frank advice and making very frank statements about the positions of the Vice President’s Office without knowing that they were being read right over there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, back to what could have been a replay of the Saturday Night Massacre of Nixon.

BARTON GELLMAN: Well, there are two extraordinary facts that just blew me away. One is that, again, Bush doesn’t know until Wednesday afternoon, when the deadline is Thursday, that Justice is not buying this. Now, you recall, at the time, John Ashcroft is in the hospital. Jim Comey is the acting attorney general. We all know about the famous visit to Ashcroft’s sickbed by Andy Card, the chief of staff; Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Now I know why.

The President comes back from a campaign swing in Cleveland, is told, “Well, we’ve got a problem. Justice—actually, Jim Comey won’t go along with this thing that Ashcroft has signed all this time.” And in fact, Card, Gonzales and Cheney and Addington know that Ashcroft is backing Comey in this. It appears that the President doesn’t know this. That’s why he dispatches his two guys to the hospital bed and say, “Well, I don’t know what’s up with this—

AMY GOODMAN: Gonzales and Card.

BARTON GELLMAN: Yeah, Gonzales and Card. “I don’t know what’s up with this Comey fellow, but let’s just go bring it to Ashcroft.” Ashcroft, everyone knows now, backed Comey.

What I found out about the hospital visit—I mean, I got a lot more detail about it, and that’s a lengthy scene in the book—is that Ashcroft said something much more dramatic than just “I’m backing Jim Comey.” He said, “If I knew then what I knew now—and I didn’t know it, because you didn’t tell me—I never would have signed off on this program in the first place.”

Now, Jim Comey, Jack Goldsmith, others at the top of Justice and the FBI considered it so outrageous that the President would try to go around the acting attorney general to a sick man in the hospital, that they were preparing to resign as of Wednesday night. And Andy Card knew that, too.

Thursday, the President signs a brand new order, rewritten by David Addington, because this whole thing was operated out of Cheney’s office, not out of the White House. The documents were actually written and stored in a vault in the Room 268 of the executive office—Eisenhower Building, next to the White House. That’s Addington’s office. Addington rewrites the thing, because they don’t have a legal certification from Justice. And now it’s sort of a—it’s a very in-your-face document he writes. It says, notwithstanding anything that Justice may say or—and notwithstanding any purported limit on the President from the judicial or legislative branches, the President, as chief law enforcement officer of the nation, authorizes this. And so, Bush, on March 11th, signs a renewal of the program, says, “We’re marching ahead, whatever Justice says.”

So, Jim Comey writes a resignation letter. And I got a copy of that letter; I reproduce it in the book. And the uprising spreads. There are about two dozen people who are getting ready to resign, including the director of the FBI, the chief lawyer for the CIA and quite a lot of people, at least the top five layers of leadership at Justice. Bush also does not know that when he signs. And he finds out almost by accident, because Condi Rice finds out by accident, in a sort of chain that I describe in the book, that there’s big trouble at Justice. She tells Bush, 7:30 Friday morning, “You better talk to Jim Comey, because there’s something going on at Justice.” And hour later, hour and a half later, Bush calls Comey into his private office and said, “What’s going on?”

Because I had access to contemporary notes and emails and other sorts of accounts, I’m able to reproduce the conversation that Comey had with Bush pretty closely. And each of them gets a really big surprise. Comey is stunned when the President says, “I just wish you weren’t raising this at the last minute, day before the deadline,” which is sort of unbelievable. I mean, Comey has been fighting this battle for three months. And he does not believe in resignation threats, Comey told me. He believes that you shouldn’t try to, you know, blackmail your way to a policy, when, if you don’t feel comfortable, you should just leave. But suddenly he’s feeling like, “I can’t count on the idea that George Bush knows what’s happening here.”

So he says, “Mr. President, I think you ought to know that Director Mueller of the FBI is going to resign today.” Bush is just stunned to hear that. He has no idea. And so, he calls in Mueller. Mueller says, “Yeah. I’m sorry. I cannot execute an order that Justice tells me is illegal.” Upholding the criminal laws of the United States is actually the prime directive of the FBI. And Bush says no mas; he caves. He reverses an order that he had written, very in-your-face, or that he had signed less than twenty-four hours earlier.

And this is just a—this is a remarkable moment in presidential history. I’m unable to find any precedent for a time when the president in wartime, or what he considered wartime, gave an order that he considered very high priority and was forced by his subordinates to back down the very next day, or any time.

The significance of this—and this is not me talking, this is the President’s senior political advisers, including Dan Bartlett, his political counselor—is that if Bush had not discovered Friday morning or had not reversed himself Friday morning, then his presidency was over. It was March of 2004. None of the people I talked to who were Bush’s political advisers think he would have been reelected. You know, look. Nixon lost three senior Justice Department officials, and they call that the Saturday Night Massacre. This would have been a couple of dozen and the FBI director. I think that’s closer to suicide than a massacre.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in the time that we have left, did it have any impact on his relationship with Cheney from then on?

BARTON GELLMAN: I think it did. I can’t know what was said between them and the aftermath of that, but what I can know is what the President said to others and how he behaved. And that was a turning point in a kind of trajectory of the Cheney vice presidency, in which he had enormous power to drive policy early on, and by around the midpoint of these eight years, he began to lose some influence. Bush still valued his opinion and his experience, but he realized that this guy had a potential to lead him off a cliff, and he had to subject Cheney’s advice to a few other filters and levels of scrutiny.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to have to do part two another time. We haven’t even begun to talk about the war in Iraq, but we’re going to get there. Barton Gellman, 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, his new book is called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

Post IKE: Missing Person Hotline - 866-898-5723

While the Houston Chronicle is ridiculing people who worry there may be many more deaths, the same newspaper published an article on the small town of San Leon in Galveston County that give us a different story.  A few words from the article are enough:

..."65 percent of the town of 4,200 stayed in San Leon during the storm, but many are still missing." "Wanted in San Leon: Residents," Houston Chronicle, September 19, 2008.

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Missing persons hotline activated

From staff reports
The Galveston County Daily News
Published September 19, 2008

The Laura Recovery Center has activated a hotline for those searching for missing friends and family who live in the unincorporated areas of Galveston County.

Unincorporated areas of the county include Bolivar Peninsula, Bacliff, San Leon, Freddiesville and Algoa.

The number for the hotline is 1-866-898-5723 or 281-482-5723. When calling, have this information regarding the missing person:

• Description of the individual;

• Address;

• Last time they were in contact with the individual;

• Plans the individual had for the storm; and

• A picture of the missing person if available.

--

Some of Ike's missing may have washed away
With no idea of numbers, authorities say final accounting may take years
updated 11:49 p.m. CT, Wed., Sept. 17, 2008

MSNBC

GALVESTON, Texas - The death toll from Hurricane Ike is remarkably low so far, considering that legions of people stayed behind as the storm obliterated row after row of homes along the Texas coast. But officials suspect there are more victims out there and say some might simply have been swept out to sea.

Exactly how many is anybody's guess, because authorities had no sure way to track those who defied evacuation orders. And the number of people reported missing after the storm, whose death toll stands at 22 in Texas and 56 overall in the U.S., is fluctuating.

State search and rescue teams on Wednesday pulled out of Galveston after checking on almost 6,000 people and performing more than 3,500 rescues.
"We don't know what's out there in the wilds," said Galveston County medical examiner Stephen Pustilniks. "Searchers weren't looking for bodies; they were looking for survivors."

Authorities are now relying on Red Cross workers and beach patrols to run welfare checks on people named by anxious relatives.

The Galveston Island Beach Patrol is still making roughly 100 checks a day on storm holdouts, working from tips called in by anxious relatives.

On his rounds Wednesday, lifeguard Marc Butler hit at least a half-dozen homes. At only one did he find who he was looking for.

Questions for years to come
As the hurricane closed in, authorities in three counties alone estimated 90,000 people ignored evacuation orders. In Galveston, another 6,000 refused to leave after Ike hit.

Nobody is suggesting that tens of thousands died, but determining what happened to those unaccounted for is a painstaking task that could leave survivors wondering for months or years to come.

Authorities concede that at least some of those who haven't turned up could have been washed out to sea, as at least one woman on the peninsula apparently was, and that other bodies might still be found.

"I'm not Pollyana. I think we will find some," said Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough, the county's highest-ranking elected official.

Pustilniks' office brought in two refrigerated tractor-trailers to store bodies until autopsies are performed. One sat in front of the medical examiner's office Wednesday morning with a sign on the side: "Jesus Christ is Lord not a cuss word."

DREAMer deported for a missing license plate light

A couple of days ago I spoke with a professor from an Arizona university who told me one of his DREAMer students was deported after being stopped for having a non-functioning light on the back license plate of her car.  She was a good student.  I guess she was one of the 15,000 arrested in Maricopa county.

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States Making Immigration Arrests Under Fed Program
By IVAN MORENO
The Associated Press
Sunday, September 21, 2008; 2:58 PM

FRUITA, Colo. -- State Patrol trooper Mike Jamison keeps an action figure of "The Thing" on his passenger seat _ a nod to the Fantastic Four, which is what Jamison and three colleagues charged with enforcing immigration law on western Colorado's highways call themselves.

His car also has a DVD burner that documents every traffic stop he makes to provide evidence for potential immigration prosecutions _ and catch any racial profiling.

"If I'm doing something wrong, and not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm going to get caught," Jamison said on a recent ride-along on Interstate 70, a pipeline for immigrant smuggling from the West to Denver and cities farther east....

Since January 2006, Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff's Department leads in arrests with 15,000...

The troopers only can stop vehicles for traffic reasons. "I've seen suspected loads (of illegal immigrants) on the highway and if I don't see a reason to stop them, I have to let them go," Jamison said.

In central Colorado, El Paso County sheriff's deputies who have taken ICE training are stationed at the county jail to help expedite removal of illegal immigrants from the crowded facility, said Sheriff Terry Maketa. They have arrested 140 people for immigration violations.

Some police agencies balk at taking on what they consider a federal responsibility. At a legislative hearing this year, the County Sheriffs of Colorado and the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police said they didn't want to do Washington's job.

Police Chief Daniel Oates in the sprawling Denver suburb of Aurora said turning officers into de facto immigration agents would undermine community trust. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson cited the financial burden of having officers concentrate on immigration enforcement.

The debate about enforcing immigration law on Colorado's roads was rekindled by a Sept. 4 crash that killed three at an Aurora ice cream store _ including a 3-year-old boy. The man suspected of causing the crash, 23-year-old Francis M. Hernandez, is a Guatemala native whom ICE says is in the country illegally. Nine law enforcement agencies had arrested Hernandez for traffic violations before the crash, but he never was reported to ICE, Counts said.

In Fruita, a town of 6,500 at the foot of the majestic Colorado National Monument, Jamison swung his patrol car through the dirt median to pursue a car flashing by at more than 90 mph. As soon he turned on his lights, the DVD burner began recording.

If Jamison had determined during the stop that the driver was an illegal immigrant, he had the authority to take the driver to an ICE detention facility. As it turned out, he cited the driver for not wearing a seat belt.

Jamison says that when he tells people what he does, most respond by saying '"Well, it's about time somebody started doing that.'"

for complete AP-WaPo article, click here

Hurricanes and deaths in the family

Hurricane IKE really slowed down our blogging.  For a few days neither one of us had electricity.  Then I had a death in the family and had to go to San Antonio - returning for a day to then leave for Washington DC (for an academic conference).  I was one of the co-chairs of the conference, so there wasn't much time for me to blog.... seems like forever.

Life is like that.  Things happen.  And sometimes, there is so much muddle in your mind you can't think straight enough to write a decent post.  That is why lots of our recent posts have just been articles.

I am home now.  Things are kind of normal again, at least for us.  I understand that there are still over 1 million people without electricity in the Houston area.  We didn't lose any trees.  We have five crepe myrtles that are about 100 years old, their roots were so deep, maybe that helped them stay in the ground.  We were lucky.

When I left for DC the plane was nearly empty.  I had a whole row to myself.  It seemed strange.  I hadn't seen such an empty plane in years and years.  Returning was different... the plane was totally full.  There were lots of people with children.  I heard people on cell phones talking about not knowing if they had electricity at home.  There was a concerned look on the faces of many.

Friday night (19th) I received a phone call from an old friend -  we talked about the death of my family member... then my friend told me a story that came from a Houston fireman, that there are many many bloated bodies in Galveston.  That a family of 19 was found among the debris - all tied together, with their social security numbers written on their legs.  Today the Houston Chronicle said it wasn't true... yet some of the comments mention police officers talking about deaths on the west end of Galveston, emergency personnel reporting 40+ deaths in San Leon.  Most comments are ridiculing those who believe there could be more deaths but local governments are keeping it quiet.  Well, I would be doubtful too, but after the malicious story of "weapons of mass destruction" from our own president, vice-president, our venerable Secretary of State (Colin Powell) and many other national leaders, I realized that governmental leaders are capable of any kind of falsehood.

Verbicide: Can Free Speech be Violent?

Can nasty speech get people to harm others?  There are incidents everywhere in history where this has happened.  On June 6, 1391, a Spanish priest named Fernando Martínez in Sevilla gave an inflammatory sermon  against Jews.  The congregation left church, going to the Jewish neighborhood screaming "death to the Jews!" - 4,000 Jews died within the next 36 hours.*

It might be worth trying to think of when this has happened in recent history:

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Transcript of Bill Moyers show on Talk Radio

September 12, 2008

BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.How ugly will it get? Very. The campaign has hit bottom this very first week, and seems to thrive there, down where the wild things are, while the country chokes on "Froth and Scum." By the way, FROTH AND SCUM is the title of a book, written by a former colleague, the historian Andie Tucher, on the sensationalist press in 19th Century America. Back then, the American author Oliver Wendell Holmes said that language is sacred, and wrote that its abuse should be as criminal as murder. He called it "...verbicide...violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning..." America has yet to make "verbicide" a hanging offense. Indeed under the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, pretty much anything goes. There are some limits — Holmes' son was the Supreme Court justice who noted in a famous opinion that you cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theater. That's because words have consequences and not just in politics. People in Knoxville, Tennessee, are asking if one of those consequences could be murder. Our correspondent Rick Karr traveled there to investigate. Let me warn you — some of the language you'll hear is graphic, provocative and downright raw.

RICK KARR: On a steamy Sunday morning in July a man armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead, another mortally wounded, and six injured.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.

RICK KARR: Members of the congregation wrestled a fifty-eight-year-old, unemployed truck driver named Jim David Adkisson to the floor and held him until police came. At first it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence until a police news conference the next day.

POLICE CHIEF STERLING OWEN: It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.

RICK KARR: Why did Adkisson hate "the liberal movement"? Police said that he told them "that all liberals should be killed ... because they were ... ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and ... ruined every institution in America...." Police said that Adkisson had targeted the Unitarian Universalist Church "because of its liberal teachings." The church advocates social justice and tolerance, and it openly welcomes gay, lesbian, and transgendered members. According to police, Adkisson said that, "Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would target those that had voted them in to office."In the weeks following the tragedy, the congregation and its pastor, Reverend Chris Buice struggled with what they were learning about Adkisson.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: Some have suggested that his spiritual attitudes, his hatred of liberals and gays, was reinforced by the right wing media figures. And it is beyond dispute that there are a plethora of books which have labeled liberals as evil, unpatriotic, godless and treasonous.

RICK KARR: During that recent sermon Buice told his congregation, some of who had risked their own lives to stop the shooting, that he has been reading some of those books.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: One of the books has the title "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism". If that author was here in this room right now I would introduce him to some good liberals who acted decisively on that Sunday, acted quickly and courageously to stop the terror that came into our church building. I would introduce him to some good liberals who know how to fight terror with more than just their mouths.

RICK KARR: Buice says even with the outpouring of sympathy from around Knoxville and across the country, Adkisson's lethal anger has left him angry and full of questions.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE:People were killed in my sanctuary of my church which should be the holy place, a safe place. People were injured. A man came in here totally dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?

RICK KARR: Buice admits that no one knows for sure and says that Adkisson alone, is responsible for the shootings. But he keeps thinking about some books that police found in Adkisson's apartment, books by popular right-wing talk-radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books police found in Adkisson's apartment was Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder". In it, Savage calls liberals "the enemy within our country;" "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler"; "traitors" who are "dangerous to your survival" and who "should be placed in a straightjacket". Like Adkisson, Savage accuses liberals of "[tying] the hands of our military".

Savage isn't just a bestselling author: he also hosts a syndicated radio show.

ANNOUNCER:"And now American's most exciting radio talk show...THE SAVAGE NATION...THE MICHAEL SAVAGE SHOW."

RICK KARR: Savage reaches more than eight and a quarter million listeners a week. And when it comes to demonizing liberals, he's the same on the air as he is in print.

MICHAEL SAVAGE:"Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet."

RICK KARR: Political liberals aren't the only targets of Savage's wrath. Back when he had a cable TV show, he bashed gay men.

MICHAEL SAVAGE: "So, you're one of the sodomites. Are you a sodomite?"

CALLER: "Yes, I am."

MICHAEL SAVAGE: "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis."

RICK KARR: And earlier this year on his radio show, he targeted kids with autism.

MICHAEL SAVAGE: "I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot.'"

PROTESTORS:"Fire Savage now! Fire Savage now!"

RICK KARR: That outburst prompted protests by outraged parents, and a few stations dropped Savage's show. So did an advertiser. But Savage hasn't apologized and he's still on the air.

MICHAEL SAVAGE: "America is being overrun by an invasion force from Mexico that'll soon take over the country[...]you psychotic liberals don't even know you're digging your own grave and throwing lime in there. All that's missing is the worm from the tequila bottle to go with it."

RICK KARR: Michael Savage isn't the only right-wing talk-radio host who launches blistering, even violent, verbal attacks on people and groups he doesn't like. Glenn Beck, for instance, fantasized about murdering a liberal filmmaker.

GLENN BECK:"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him. Is this wrong?"

RICK KARR: Michael Reagan, son of the former president, suggested that people who claim that "nine-eleven was an inside job," a U.S. government conspiracy, deserve to die.

MICHAEL REAGAN: "Take them out and shoot them. They are traitors to this country, and shoot them. But anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that's what they are, and you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet."

RICK KARR: Neal Boortz went after victims of Hurricane Katrina.

NEAL BOORTZ:"That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden. That's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them."

RICK KARR: Muslims are some of Boortz's favorite targets.

NEAL BOORTZ:"It's Ramadan and Muslims in your workplace might be offended if they see you eating at your desk. Why? I guess it's because Muslims don't eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sorta like cockroaches."

RICK KARR: Reverend Chris Buice says he's heard that kind of language before.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.

RICK KARR: Millions of Americans tune in to right-wing talk radio every day. Rory O'Connor is a media critic and a liberal himself who's written a book on shock-talkers. He says not all of these broadcasters use violent language. But they do all share a predilection for outrage and, he says, they're all practically addicted to constantly cranking up that outrage.

RORY O'CONNOR: Here's the real problem. When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it's not shocking any longer. It's already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? I think that in order to continue to outrage, you have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there's gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who's gonna say, "You know what? That's a good idea. Let me act on that."

GLENN BECK:"The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment."

RICK KARR: Entertainers — that's what a lot of the shock-talkers call themselves. O'Connor says, maybe. But their words can motivate their listeners to act.

RORY O'CONNOR: Now first and foremost, we have to recognize that many of them are employed across multiple platforms. So they may say something on their radio show, but they may repeat it on their television show. They may then repeat it in their newspaper column. They may repackage the ideas into their best-selling books.

RICK KARR: Last year's debate over the immigration reform bill became a case study for Rory O'Connor. As arguments went back and forth, some of the language turned venomous. Hosts amped up their audiences' outrage with attacks on the bill's supporters and verbal assaults on immigrants.

NEAL BOORTZ: "I already have received at least one brilliant email today about the immigration problem [...]this person sent me an email, said when we defeat this illegal alien amnesty bill and when we yank out the welcome mat and they all start going back to Mexico, as a going-away gift let's all give them a box of nuclear waste[...]tell 'em it can, it'll heat tortillas."

BILL O'REILLY: "But do you understand what the NEW YORK TIMES wants? And the far left want? They want to break down the white, Christian male power structure which you are a part and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have."

RICK KARR:O'Connor says the result stunned Washington.

RORY O'CONNOR: There were massive numbers of emails and letters and phone calls. You know, senators said, they had to have two or three people in their office answering the calls. That was all that they could do. They were inundated. And beyond that, how do you get their attention? Well, I tell you. If you send those threatening letter to a senator's home, that gets his attention pretty fast.

RICK KARR: Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez got a threatening letter at home. North Carolina Republican Richard Burr got a threatening call at his office. South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham told the NEW YORK TIMES that he and others had received threats, too. The TIMES also reported that a mass email opposing the bill suggested that its supporters needed to be "taken out by ANY MEANS". The bipartisan support collapsed, the bill died and right-wing talk-radio hosts took credit.

RORY O'CONNOR: This is evidence of their vast power. I mean, you know, President George Bush was pulling out all his political capital to get immigration reform passed. Trent Lott was backing him up with everything he had. And guess what? The President and the Republican leadership and Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership, they all lost. And they lost to a bunch of radio jocks.

RICK KARR: Right-wing talk radio hosts usually reserve their ad hominem attacks for liberal figures. Jim Quinn has his own name for the National Organization for Women.

JIM QUINN: "The National Organization for Whores, they're whores for liberal politics in general, and they were whores for Bill Clinton in particular."

RICK KARR: Glenn Beck tried to connect former Vice President Al Gore's efforts against global warming with Nazism.

GLENN BECK: "What was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews? Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to, you know, Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however[...]you got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming."

RICK KARR: During this year's Democratic primaries, Rush Limbaugh urged his listeners to vote for Senator Hillary Clinton to foster division in the Democratic Party in the hope that that would lead to violence in the streets of Denver. He called it "Operation Chaos".

RUSH LIMBAUGH:"This is about chaos, this is why it is called Operation Chaos[...]the dream end, if people say what is your exit strategy. The dream end is this keeps up to the convention. And that we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots and all of that. That's the objective here."

RICK KARR: American politics has always been a rough game. But political scientist Jeffrey Feldman, who's written a book on the effects of angry political rhetoric, says this is different.

JEFFREY FELDMAN: Our system is a deliberative democracy. And that deliberative democracy depends on a certain kind of talk, a certain conversation in order to function well. What right-wing rhetoric does, when it reaches that violent pitch, is it undermines that particular conversation, such that the focus of political debate, becomes increasingly hamstrung by fear, and the ability of citizens to engage in the basic act of civics becomes gummed up. That conversation breaks down.

RICK KARR: Knoxville pastor Chris Buice agrees.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: When you blame all your problems on some minority group then everyone else is exonerated. We exonerate ourselves. We don't have to look at ourselves to see what sort of ways we contribute to the problems of the world. We don't have to examine ourselves, to see what we are doing that is helping to create the problems that we're so concerned about.

RICK KARR: In other words, Buice says, angry talk-radio rhetoric simply sets up scapegoats for society's problems. And ever since Jim David Adkisson walked into his church and opened fire he can't help but wonder whether that might lead to more violence.

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE:I just think a lot of people are hurling insults from the safety of television studios, the safety of radio studio, the safety of cyberspace, which they would not throw if they had to stand right next to a person and look in their face and say the same thing. And so that's a void in our community, the chance to be in the same room and to have these exchanges and remember the humanity of the person on the other side.

BILL MOYERS:We may never know what finally triggered the killer's rage, unless he chooses at his trial or later to tell us. But not for a moment do I think any of the talk show hosts mentioned by the police would have wished it to happen.

We asked several radio hosts to come on this broadcast and talk about the story; they either declined or didn't return our calls. The issue of course is not their right to say anything they want on the air. The First Amendment guarantees their free speech as it does mine. Government shouldn't be the arbiter of what the Bill of Rights leaves to one's own sense of fair play. Watching that report, however, I was reminded of a story from folk lore about the tribal elder telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "My son it is between two wolves. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked, "Which wolf won?" His grandfather answered, "The one I feed." So, too, America's public life. The wolf that wins is the wolf we feed. Media provides the fodder.

We'll be back in just a bit with more about the media's role in America's public life and in this presidential campaign. But first, this is one of those times we remind you that you are the public in public broadcasting. This station needs your support and is waiting for your call. Thank you.

from blog:

Hispanic-Latinos Anti-Defamation Coalition - SF

Rage on the Radio - Bill Moyers Journal

September 12, 2008

What happens when America's airwaves fill with hate? BILL MOYERS JOURNAL takes a tough look at the hostile industry of "Shock Jock" media with a hard-hitting examination of its effects on our nation's political discourse. The JOURNAL traveled to Knoxville, where a recent shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church has left the pastor asking what role hateful speech from popular right-wing media personalities may have played in the tragedy. "A lot of people are hurling insults from the safety of television studios, the safety of radio studio, the safety of cyberspace," says Rev. Chris Buice, "So that's a void in our community — the chance to be in the same room and to have these exchanges and remember the humanity of the person on the other side."

The Reach of Talk Radio
Talk radio is loud — very loud. According to TALKERS magazine, the leading publication of the talk radio industry, Rush Limbaugh attracts more than 14 million listeners across the nation each week, one of the largest audiences in any broadcast medium; Sean Hannity, over 13 million; Michael Savage, more than 8 million.

With such a large and devoted audience, the topics the hosts focus on may significantly impact the national discussion. Media expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson noted during the last election cycle that talk radio may well wield the power to set the agenda:

When something gets into mainstream media, it has a half-life of about 30 seconds. Where something that moves into talk radio can have a half-life of two or three years.

Not all talk radio is politically conservative, but in TALKER magazine's list of top ten personalities by audience, nine are conservative, and one is lifestyle and finance. And, presidents and policy-makers alike know that the power of talk radio is important to energizing the conservative base. But talk radio's agenda is not always in step with the administration. For example, the top-rated conservative hosts opposed a 2007 compromise immigration bill backed by President Bush. According to a report by the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), Limbaugh, Hannity, and Savage devoted the single largest chunk of their airtime to immigration in the second quarter of 2007, with immigration consuming 16% of the airtime of conservative talk radio as a whole.

The PEJ stopped short of saying the hosts helped kill the bill, but they did report that others felt that way:

"Talk radio is running America," complained Mississippi Republican Senator Trent Lott. "We have to deal with that problem." On June 28—more than 40 days after the introduction of a compromise immigration bill backed by President Bush and some senators—the year's most ambitious domestic legislative initiative was defeated in the Senate. Lott was not alone in attributing the bill's defeat to talk radio. Some Democrats even talked of reviving the long-repealed Fairness Doctrine as a way of potentially balancing the politics on conservative-dominated talk radio. In talk circles, this became known as the "Hush Rush" bill, a reference to conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who was a vocal critic of the immigration bill.

But others argue the conservative talkers are beholden to their audience — that they amplify rather than invent conservative sentiments. The NEW YORK TIMES reports: "When conservatives are agitated at the president, radio hosts feel pressured to stand with the conservatives against the president to prove their independence," said Tim Graham, an analyst at the Media Research Center, a conservative news monitoring group.

*From Tradiciones y leyendas Sevillanas by José María de Mena, Plaza & Janes Editores

Someone FINALLY pointing to Cheney

Maybe now that the Bush torture period is almost over, it is looking like someone might actually start taking seriously our federal laws.   Were they waiting for this presidential term to end so they could (finally) begin pointing fingers?

We will see how Cheney tries to wiggle out of this...

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Cheney Is Ordered to Preserve Wide Set of Records

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/New York Times
Published: September 20, 2008
Filed at 7:41 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge on Saturday ordered Dick Cheney to preserve a wide range of the records from his time as vice president.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under by the Presidential Records Act.

The Bush administration's legal position ''heightens the court's concern'' that some records may not be preserved, said the judge.

A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing Cheney and the Executive Office of the President in an effort to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public...

for complete AP/NYT article click here

Post IKE: Will ICE Go After Undocumented who seek services?

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Undocumented workers fear asking for help after Ike
Many have lost everything but won't seek aid
By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 19, 2008, 10:57PM

GALVESTON — Elmer Martinez, 22, lost all his possessions in Hurricane Ike's storm surge. The restaurant where he worked is closed, and it may be weeks before he finds another job.

That would make him like many Galveston residents, except for one important distinction: He is one of several thousand illegal immigrants living in a post-storm limbo, afraid they will be discovered by the squads of law enforcement officers now patrolling the streets and guarding the causeway entrance.

Some of the undocumented immigrants are hesitant to leave the island, worrying they will not be allowed back. While they wait for work to resume, the financial assistance for housing and personal losses offered by government agencies is not available since they lack valid U.S. identity documents.

ICE reassurance
Many would like to remain and work on what will surely be an extensive rebuilding effort along the length of the storm-ravaged island beginning when residents return sometime next week. Hundreds, if not thousands of homes, restaurants and office buildings will have to be gutted, and new Sheetrock installed and plaster and paint applied.

''I don't have papers, and it will be hard to stay," said Martinez, who sends home much of his wages to support five younger siblings in Guatemala. ''Since the storm, with no papers, you remain in your house. You're afraid you'll be deported."

The fear of deportation is pervasive in the immigrant community in Galveston despite public assurances by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, and local and county officials, that no enforcement operations are under way.

''We're not enforcing any immigration laws in the city. We don't have time for that," said Galveston Police Chief Charles Wiley. ''As long as they're not violating other laws, we don't have the resources to enforce immigration laws."

County Judge James D. Yarbrough said officers are not inquiring about immigration status at the entrance to the causeway or other checkpoints in the city.

City officials do not know exactly how many illegal immigrants live in Galveston, a city of 58,000 residents where roughly a third of the population is Hispanic, said public information officer Alicia Cahill.

''We don't have an official number, but an estimate would be 2,000 or fewer," she said.

Galveston residents receiving food, water and ice at distribution centers are not required to show proof of residence or identity, she added.

On Friday, Martinez was helping Bogar Nava and his two sisters clean out their flooded home off 57th Street. Mold was already evident on the walls of the soaked wood-frame house. Only the sodden clothes, airing on the chain-link fence, seemed salvageable.

''We lost everything, absolutely everything," said Nava, a 38-year-old Mexico City native who followed his older sister to Galveston five years ago. ''What we're doing is trying to save the little we could find, but really, it's been nothing — just clothes.

None of the family members have work documents, but all have at least one or sometimes two or three jobs.

Avoiding FEMA
By mid-morning Friday, Nava had drained water from the engine of a green Dodge Neon and got it running. As he turned to work on two other flooded cars, landlord Paul Zendeh-del arrived with water and other supplies.

He embraced Nava's sisters, and told them his own house had been flooded.

''These are very good people, and they're hard-working — some work two or three jobs, and their kids go to school here," Zendeh-del said.

The landlord said many immigrants, even those here lawfully, are reluctant to ask for help from FEMA and other agencies.

''They get scared to go and ask for help because the National Guard is out there," Zendeh-del said.

for link to article click here

California court ruling on in-state tuition is not the last word

From The National Immigration Law Center, this is the latest news:

On Monday, September 15, a California Court of Appeal panel overturned the Superior Court's decision dismissing a challenge to AB 540, California's in-state tuition law. Martinez v. Regents of the University of California, No. C054124 (CA3 Sept. 15, 2008). The Court of Appeal's ruling, if allowed to stand, would return the case to the Superior Court for trial. The court did not enjoin or block AB 540. The law remains in effect. Similar laws in others states were not affected by the ruling. The decision will likely be appealed and any final decision is likely to come from the California Supreme Court.

AB 540 provides that students who have attended at least 3 years of high school in California, graduated from a California school and meet certain other conditions may attend state colleges and universities at the same rate that is charged to state residents. Some students who qualify for AB 540 are undocumented immigrants who live in California. Others are U.S. citizens who attended school in California in the past but are now unable to establish state residence, such as those who live in a neighboring state or those who recently returned to California after living elsewhere. In fact, about 70 percent of AB 540 students attending the University of California are U.S. citizens who do not meet the state residency requirements for in-state tuition purposes.

Despite these facts, the Martinez Court found that AB 540 confers a benefit "based on residence" and therefore conflicts with a federal law that precludes such a benefit for undocumented immigrants unless the same benefit is available under the same conditions to U.S. citizens who are not residents of the state. The opinion is internally inconsistent, and conflicts with other court decisions that have addressed the in-state tuition issue.

It would be extremely unfortunate if this intermediate court decision were upheld. The affected students are talented high achievers, who grew up in California and persevered against the odds to graduate from high school and meet the qualifications for higher education. They include valedictorians, class presidents, and student prizewinners, among others. California can ill afford to deny these students the opportunity to complete their education. The elected representatives and governor of California as well as those of nine other states - where the majority of undocumented immigrants live - have determined that it is a wise policy to charge these students an affordable tuition.

Monday's decision is only one step in the process of resolving the legality of AB 540. The decision is based on a flawed legal analysis and we are hopeful that it will be reversed.

The Martinez case adds urgency to efforts to pass the federal DREAM Act and thereby address the status of undocumented immigrant students who have grown up in this country. The federal DREAM Act would provide immigration relief to those who entered the U.S. more than 5 years ago if and when they graduate from high school. It would allow them to become permanent residents and eventually citizens if they go to college or serve in the military.

For more information, please contact Josh Bernstein at bernstein@nilc.org

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Hurricane IKE: Services for Houston-Galveston Area Citizens & Legal Residents

DREAMers & other undocumented residents need not apply

Too bad this is only for people with social security numbers.  I guess only citizens are considered needy enough for support.  

Thursday September 18, 2008

Notice:

of a service being organized by Congressman Nick Lampson. In order to provide assistance to those affected by Hurricane Ike, a mobile congressional office will be opening today, September 18, 2008, at American Legion Post 490 located at 11702 Galveston Rd.(State Hwy 3), Houston, TX 77034 (across from Ellington Field).

The facility will be open from 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM and affected residents will be able to report claims of hurricane damage with FEMA, request loans from the Small Business Administration, and begin the process of receiving funds to repair damage. This truck will provide 225 laptop computers with internet connectivity and 225 cell phones. Congressman Lampson's staff will be on hand to help you through the FEMA claims process.

I encourage you to tell your friends and family throughout the Houston area about the availability of this mobile office. Many victims of Hurricane Ike are being told to call or go online to register claims, which is not possible in some areas due to lack of electricity. Please take advantage of this invaluable resource.



Please make sure to bring the following items to the mobile office:

- Social Security Number

- Description of losses caused by disaster

- Insurance information

- Directions to the damaged property

- A telephone number where you can be contacted



Helpful phone numbers and websites for affected residents:

If you need immediate assistance, call the Red Cross at 211 or Texas Operations Center at 512-424-2208.

For a comprehensive overview of the state's activity related to Hurricane Ike response and recovery, please visit the Hurricane Center on the governor's website at: http://governor.state.tx.us/hurricane/.

At the state's request, federal transitional housing assistance is now available to those Texas evacuees with inaccessible or uninhabitable homes. The list of approved hotels/motels can be found at: http://femaevachotels.com/. Please note that the number of approved hotels/motels is constantly being updated. To register for transitional housing assistance, visit http://www.fema.gov/ or call FEMA toll free at 1-800-621-3362 or 1-800-462-7585.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas has launched a feature on its website to allow customers to check power outages by entering their utility provider and zip code at: http://www.puc.state.tx.us/files/ike.cfm.

Texas residents who have been displaced by Hurricane Ike who evacuated to another state may call 1-877-541-7905 to reach the Texas 2-1-1 network and obtain information on how and where to apply for food stamp benefits or seek additional assistance.

For price gouging please call 1-800-621-0500 for the Texas Attorney Generals office. For instances of gas gouging please call 800-244-3301.

Texas residents displaced by Hurricane Ike who evacuated to another area of Texas may call 2-1-1 from any Texas landline or Texas cell phone to obtain information on how and where to apply for food stamp benefits or seek additional assistance.

In-state tuition for Immigrant Students in California under attack!

AB540 is still the law in California, but our friends will be fighting a battle coming up to keep it that way. Recently, Texas went under a similar attack where we fought hard to keep in-state tuition two years ago.

In California, Uncertainty on Immigrant Student Tuition

In reinstating a lawsuit challenging tuition policy Monday, a California appeals court unanimously found that a state statute extending lower in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants conflicts with federal law and “thwarts the will of Congress.”

California is one of 10 states that makes undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition rates. In California’s case, students can be exempt from paying nonresident rates if they graduated from and attended a California high school for three or more years and, in the case of undocumented students, if they file an affidavit stating intent to legalize their status if they become eligible to do so.

On a federal level, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit dismissed a challenge to a similar law in Kansas in 2007 because the plaintiffs were found to lack standing.

n the appeal court’s ruling in Martinez v. Regents of the University of California, which had earlier been dismissed by a trial court, the panel of three judges defined the central question at hand as whether the state’s authorization of in-state tuition rates for illegal immigrants violates federal law, which maintains: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a state (or a political subdivision) for any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit (in no less an amount, duration, and scope) without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.”

The defendants — spanning all three of California’s public university and college systems — held that the state statute does not conflict with federal law because (1) in-state tuition is not a “benefit,” as it’s defined under federal law, and because (2) rather than being extended “on the basis of residence within a state,” lower tuition rates for illegal immigrants are conditioned on California high school attendance and graduation.

The appellate court rejected the colleges’ arguments on both counts, finding, on the first point, that significantly cheaper in-state tuition is in fact a “benefit.” Furthermore, the judges write, “the three-year attendance requirement at a California high school is a surrogate residence requirement.”

The section of California’s education code at issue here “falls within the principle of implied preemption in that it stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress,” the appeals court found. The judges returned the case for consideration at the lower trial court level.

“I think it’s going to be very difficult for the defendants to defend this policy, in that the higher court, the appellate court, has already decided that ...this one section of the education code is preempted by federal law,” said Ralph W. Kasarda, a staff attorney for the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs.

Filed as a class action suit, the plaintiffs are a group of U.S. citizen students (or tuition-paying parents). The students are from other states but are enrolled at California public colleges at nonresident tuition rates. They argue that the high school attendance requirement “illegally discriminates” against them “by denying them a benefit provided to illegal aliens.”

“The State of California here tried to claim that they carefully chose their words in the statute in such a way to evade Congress’ intent and find a loophole in the statute. And what the court said was, ‘No, no such loophole exists,’ ” said Kris W. Kobach, a professor of law at University of Missouri at Kansas City who is one of two lead lawyers for the plaintiffs.

While the California appeals court decision is not binding in other states, it will likely have an impact beyond the state’s borders, Kobach said. “Frequently you will hear of states considering nearly identical statutes as the California law, and one of the arguments that is made is, ‘California’s law has never been struck down. None of these other laws have been struck down or held to be in violation of federal law, why don’t we go ahead and do it?’ Now every state legislature in the country will be put on notice.”

“It should serve as a shot across the bow to the other nine states that they are potentially exposed to liability because of their statutes,” Kobach continued.

Christopher M. Patti, university counsel for the UC System, said that while lawyers are still analyzing the opinion, “We are considering the possibility of a petition for review in the California Supreme Court.”

“I think that in any appeal the major focus would likely be on this issue of whether this is a residency-based requirement,” said Patti. “The legislature thought about that issue and tried to fashion a bill that complied with federal law, and we think they did that successfully. So that’s something that if there’s an appeal, the Supreme Court is going to have to grapple with.”

As of now, however, “the law is still in full effect, and [the decision] should not have any immediate impact on the colleges,” said Steven Bruckman, executive vice chancellor and general counsel for the California Community College System. He estimated that about 20,000 community college students, most of whom are undocumented immigrants, would lose their eligibility for cheaper resident tuition if the law were ultimately declared invalid.

“Our mission is to provide broad access to education. A court ruling that would limit access to students is disappointing to us,” he said.

“We will fight it as long as it is necessary to clarify this,” said Michael A. Olivas, a professor and expert on higher education and immigration law at the University of Houston. He faulted the California appeals court for misreading laws relative to residency. “What federal law requires is that people who have access to this status of being a resident may not be given any more advantage if they’re undocumented than if they’re a citizen. I say that’s fine. California still requires that you have been there 12 months [to declare residency]. The undocumented don’t get it by 11 months.”

Olivas disagreed with the assertion that the decision is relevant in other states, although he acknowledges it is being watched widely. “No other state is bound by what one state does, and they’re particularly not bound by it when the state got it wrong. They weren’t bound by it when the trial court in effect got it right.”

Statewide March in Sacramento- September 26th

College Student Vote Has Control of Election- if it wants to

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University and College Could Hold Keys to Power in the White House
The Guardian - London
September 17, 2008


It is voter registration day on the campus of Kutztown university in Pennsylvania and a small but dogged group of students are trying to persuade classmates to sign up for the November presidential election. Decades ago they might have done so through bribery or, failing that, the fist; but these days the preferred method is humour.

"Voting is sexy and easy - register now!" says a poster on the wall, alongside a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey panel which students play blindfolded.

Ostensibly, the voter drive is non-partisan, but it is clear from flyers on the table this group backs Barack Obama. They are part of the Students4Obama movement that has swept through more than 700 campuses across America in a revival of youth engagement that could be decisive on polling day.

While the battle for the White House appears to be tightening, the campus remains one place where Obama can still expect overwhelming support. His dominance among young voters is clear in Kutztown, a state university that draws its students from across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

Obama supporters in Kutztown are organised through a cyber club on the social-networking site Facebook, which boasts 957 members. They hold regular rallies and parties, hand out leaflets countering the negative ads put out by the McCain campaign, and gently browbeat their fellows into signing up to vote. "I believe Obama's genuine," says Erika Reinhard, 22, who devotes up to six hours a week on the campaign. "He promises to reunite the country, and that's what we need."

By contrast, there can be few positions in politics lonelier than that of the Republican student organiser. Zac Roberts, 21, is president of the Kutztown university body which boasts a membership of barely 30 out of 10,000 students and is thoroughly out-gunned by their Democratic rivals. Asked about the Republican Facebook group, he replies: "That's a good idea. I might set one up."

Such disparities are replicated among Pennsylvania's 780,000 student population, and in campuses throughout the US. It is highlighted by the work of Harvard University's Institute of Politics, which tracked the behaviour of young voters for the past eight years.

It shows that while John Kerry enjoyed a 13-point lead on George Bush among 18- to 24-year-olds at this stage in the 2004 election, Obama is 23 points ahead of John McCain. The institute's researchers have found exceptional levels this year of engagement among the young, with 62% of young voters reporting that they were excited about the election and more than two-thirds saying they were definitely, or probably, intending to vote.

It was not ever thus. When the Harvard project began in 2000, it found a mood among students that was apathetic, as reflected in a dismal turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds of 30% - well below the figure for all ages of 51%.

Then came 9/11, a catastrophe that changed everything, says John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard institute. "There was a massive change in attitude, especially among young people, towards politics being important in their lives."

The transformation was well under way before Obama hit the headlines. Della Volpe sees it as a profound generational shift among what many analysts call the "millennial generation" - those born in the 1980s and 90s and now reaching a political coming of age.

He points out that this generation accounts for a quarter of Americans and is the largest in history - bigger, even, than the baby boomers. As such, Della Volpe is convinced it is large enough and enthusiastic enough to hold the balance of power in November.

Peter Levine, who heads Circle, a nonpartisan research body at Tufts university that studies political engagement among young voters, traces the shift to a growing optimism. The deep distrust in politicians found among the so-called Generation X of the mid-60s and 70s, and their pessimism in their ability to influence affairs, has given way to renewed faith in politics as a force for good. Levine says: "That makes them more motivated to support a candidate, as otherwise why bother? And it also has a fit with Obama, as he stands for making things better."

Though the generational shift predated him, Obama has expropriated it as his own. Not only is his message of hope tailored to attract the young, but he has also constructed a campaign that talks their language.

Howard Dean set a precedent in this regard with his primary run in 2004, in which he launched Meetup, an online campaign that drove thousands of first-time voters into his camp. The Obama campaign has built on that experience directly - its new-media director, Joe Rospars, cut his political teeth with the Dean campaign.

Facebook tells the story. As of last night, Obama had 1,847,187 Facebook friends. McCain had 335,528. On top of that, the campaign has created platforms across numerous internet-networking sites, from Twitter to Faithbase and BlackPlanet. The beauty of the approach is that it is bottom up rather than top down, allowing young people to run their own Obama-supporting groups unfettered by central control.

The technique has unleashed huge energy in the process at relatively little cost. Studies have shown that while it costs $60 to mobilise one voter through direct mail, and $30 through phone banking, it costs only $1.56 through cyberspace tools such as social networking sites, text-messaging and email.

The impact was visible in the primaries and caucuses, where 7 million voters under 30 turned out, helping to trounce the hopes of Hillary Clinton by voting for Obama in a ratio of four to one. The impact is also visible in Kutztown, where the student Obama group stages events with only minimal contact with the official Democratic campaign.

It's not an entirely painless business, nor one devoid of anxiety. Erika Reinhard says she has found it harder since the summer break to get other students "fired up", as Obama would put it, about his candidacy. A sense of urgency has dissipated which the group is scrambling to reignite. "A lot of people are supporting Obama, but I'm not sure they will make it to the polling booth."

Her anxieties have some grounding. According to Circle, young people aged 18 to 29 are the most likely group to remain undecided about their voting intentions until election day.

But the degree of jitters that remains on Obama's side is insufficient to cheer up Zac Roberts as he contemplates electoral oblivion for McCain, at least on this campus. "Students are getting politically engaged again," he says mournfully. "Young people don't understand what they are talking about, and I would rather they just didn't get involved."

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Confronting Michael Savage in San Francisco

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - PLEASE DISTRIBUTE / CIRCULATE!



CLEAR CHANNEL REVISITED AFTER A YEAR OF REFUSING TO MEET WITH THE COMMUNITY- UNREPENTANT MICHAEL SAVAGE CONTINUES TO SPEW HATE!

2nd ANNUAL PROTEST
- ANTI-HATE SPEECH & DISINFORMATION DEMONSTRATION!

WHEN: Tuesday September 23, 2008

TIME: 4PM-6PM

PLACE: CLEAR CHANNE, 340 TOWNSEND

SAN FRANCISCO CA.(between 4th&5th St. next to Caltrain Station)

As hate speech spirals, a local group of community activists are organizing a demonstration in San Francisco against shock jock Michael Savage. The group, Hispanic / Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition SF and allied Community Organizations, plan to rally in front of the building which houses radio station KNEW-AM where Savage transmits his nationally-syndicated program.

On his program, Savage call for troops on the street "to protect us from the scourge of illegal immigrants who are running rampant across America, killing our police for sport, raping, murdering like a scythe across America while the liberal psychos are telling us they come here to work." Or that autism is a "fraud, a racket, that in 99 percent of cases is a brat who hasn’t been told to cut their act out" and to stop being ‘morons‘, he also tells fasting immigrant students "to starve to death, then we won’t have a problem."

These kind of statements incite people who are already angry and resentful, as when Jim David Adkisson entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun, killed two people and wounded six during the presentation of a children's musical. In his car, police found a four-page letter where he expressed his hatred of the "liberal movement’, and wrote he targeted the church "because of its liberal teachings" and his belief that "all liberals should be killed" because they were "ruining the country." Inside Adkisson’s home, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage.

Shock jocks insist their rants are not hurting anyone and that they are not inciting hate attacks. Meanwhile disenfranchised groups continue to be targeted. Another instance was the senseless savage beating that resulted in the death of Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala by a group of four young white males in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania on July 12, 2008. Luis E. Ramirez was a hard-working father of small children and a decent member of the community. His killers ranted racial comments against Mexicans while cowardly beating him; as reported by eyewitnesses.

For too long the Hispanic/Latino, and other minority communities in the Bay Area have suffered Clear Channel/the Savage Nation/Michael Savage and his attacks. His insulting, degrading, sophomoric tirades are racist and divisive to a dangerous level. His rhetoric, has resulted in erroneous definitions of whom we are as Hispanic/ Latinos and he contributes to stereotypes which we have for a long time tried to defuse.

We, the Hispanic/Latino community in the Bay Area hold CLEAR CHANNEL/The Savage Nation/Michael Savage and other shock-jocks like him and their Media Channel Broadcasters directly responsible for the increase in crimes against Hispanic US Citizens, Latinos, Immigrants, other groups and individuals; and for destroying and terrorizing our communities through their hateful ON-AIR XENOPHOBIC, HENCE, UN-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA! " .

As in Last year's Protest, the Peninsula Contingent will be boarding CalTrain’s “Hispanic Dignity Train” From San Jose to San Francisco as it stops in each local station to join us in front of 340 Townsend St.

Contacts info:

San Francisco: (650)-740-1910 -- (415)-368-8406

SF Peninsula: (650)-324-4082 -- (650)-992-1680

Hispanic / Latinos Anti-Defamation Coalition SF
"http://hladc-sf.blogspot.com/"

Filming the "changing planetary order"

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A New Film Focus on Immigrants

movies are shifting from the journey itself to the issues that crop up after arrival, exploring how the changes affect everyone, including members of the affected communities.
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 14, 2008

IN COURTNEY HUNT'S absorbing new feature film "Frozen River," an Upstate New York blue-collar mom decides to take a job in one of America's hottest growth industries: people smuggling.

Not that Ray (Melissa Leo) is very clued in about why so many illegal immigrants are risking their lives trying to slip into the United States or has much sympathy for their plight. Juggling a harried life that includes two kids, two jobs and an absentee gambler husband, Ray has enough problems of her own without worrying about the Chinese and Pakistani refugees she's shuttling in the trunk of her car across the Canadian border.

"If they want to come here so bad they should take the time to learn English," Ray blurts out at one point to her partner in malfeasance, Lila (Misty Upham), a wry Mohawk Indian laboring mightily herself to make ends meet.

What remains unsaid in this subtle, perceptive movie, is that Ray actually has more in common than she realizes with her desperate human cargo. Like them, she occupies one of American society's lower socio-economic rungs. But history and cultural conditioning have taught her to think of immigrants as aliens, sub-humans, the Other. The movie's power derives in large measure from Ray's belated recognition of a deeper, common humanity she shares with these exiles.

The representation in American movies of immigrants (and of two close relations, ethnicity and "race") is practically as old as the movies themselves, from "Birth of a Nation" and Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant" to "Crash" and "Under the Same Moon." Today, as mass immigration has evolved into a global phenomenon, a growing number of filmmakers in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as the United States are probing immigration's causes as well as its consequences for the lives of ordinary people.

Macro yet micro

SEVERAL more Hollywood movies slated to open this fall and winter will explore immigration themes, whether explicitly or covertly. They include "Towelhead," a drama directed by Alan Ball (an Oscar winner for the "American Beauty" screenplay), set during the Gulf War, about a 13-year-old Arab American girl sent to Houston to live with her authoritarian Lebanese father; and Wayne Kramer's "Crossing Over," a multi-story ensemble drama about immigrants of several nationalities trying to gain legal status in Los Angeles. The marquee cast includes Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd.

In a way that's characteristic of many of these new films, "Frozen River" has a global perspective but an intimate focus. Its view of immigration is less anchored in large-scale political abstractions than in the nuanced emotional relations between its very specific characters and situations. It has nothing to say directly about, say, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Instead, it looks at immigration as a dual exchange in which the American characters are as impacted as the foreigners by their brushes with each other.

That reflects Hunt's belief that, in the post-Sept. 11 era, Americans gradually are awakening to the complex, challenging world around them. "We live in a very narrow-minded place," she said by phone, referring to the United States. "The world is getting smaller, and even in the interior of America we're going to learn a lot about the other people coming in."

"Frozen River" isn't the only recent movie to suggest that global immigration and cross-cultural encounters are shaping American attitudes, both at home and abroad. In films such as Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" (2003), the middle-class Americans played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, thrown together by fate in Tokyo, are shown to be relatively as disoriented and challenged by a "foreign" culture as any Saharan émigré braving his first Midwestern winter.

In Tom McCarthy's indie hit "The Visitor," Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a stoic college professor whose passion for life after his wife's death is rekindled through his unexpected encounter with a Syrian-Senegalese couple in New York. His dormant emotions are further aroused when the male half of the couple is taken into custody at an immigration center and his attractive mother arrives from Detroit to try to help her son.

'A very tricky issue'

McCARTHY'S research for the movie, which included hanging out in immigrant communities, attending academic conferences and visiting immigrants being held in U.S. detention centers -- mostly innocent young men with no criminal records, he said -- convinced him that "we can do better" as Americans in managing border control. The screenplay provides Walter with a brief, rousing speech about treating people humanely, which he shouts, in frustration, at some detention officials.

But while the movie's sympathies clearly lie with Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), the young Syrian drummer who winds up in custody, "The Visitor" avoids preaching about the politics of immigration, which McCarthy describes as "a very tricky issue." "We need laws, people have to abide by laws, we need to enforce those laws," the director said. "It's a huge, huge, complex question."

Instead of polemics, "The Visitor" offers a gentle plea for opening ourselves up to the unfamiliar, the alien, in life. Rather than being a source of anxiety and confusion, in movies like "Lost in Translation" and "The Visitor" the experience of being an "outsider," whether abroad or in one's native land, is presented as an opportunity for reshaping one's identity while discovering what makes other people tick.

"First and foremost," McCarthy says of his movie, "it isn't just about immigration, it's really about people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different pla