Where is the Big “O”? The Faux OUTRAGE

Faux News is going to beat this to death. How on earth does an intelligence failure turn in to such outrage? Were they outraged over that big intelligence failure, 9-11? How about the mission accomplished fanfare? How about the weapons of mass destruction intelligence failure that was just a flat out lie? How about the outing of Valerie Plame that ruined a woman’s career?

Not much outrage there. Faux News has to stir up their base and the old people. What’s a good day without working up the base?

How odd that there were protests all around the world over a video but in Benghazi, no one had seen or heard of said video. It was just all terrorist attack? Stupid Obama! Stupid Susan Rice. Stupid Hillary Clinton! Get on over there and fix the problem.

Poet Nikki Giovanni reflects on VA Tech–6 years after the Massacre of April 16, 2007

Nikki Geiovanni saw that something was wrong with Cho almost immediately. If she could tell, why couldn’t the other people tell? Why couldn’t Tech administration? Why didn’t someone step in when Nikki refused to teach him? Why was he allowed to buy a gun?

What has changed since that horrible, snowy day in Blackburg, 6 years ago? What has changed to at least attempt to keep the horrific events of that day from reoccurring? Nothing I am aware of. It’s even easier to buy a gun and mental health services have been cut back both statewise and locally.

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9/11/12 Reflections: 11 years later

Each of us remembers 9-11 in our own way.  It has been 11 years.  In many ways, on this day we are stuck in a time warp of disbelief and will forever visualize those planes hitting the buildings, the falling bodies, the crumpling buildings and that huge cloud of poisonous debris hurling forward at those trying to escape its fury.  When do we move on from those horrible visuals to a quieter more reflective mood?

It’s another clear, cripsy fall Tuesday in September, just like 9/11/01.  I am going to try to start today.  I may not make it.  Feel free to share your 9/11 thoughts.

 

The Discretionary Funds Aftermath

Far more interesting than the original fight over discretionary funds is the aftermath.  There is lots of Monday morning quarterbacking going on and lots of insider conspiracy theory trip trap being cited.

Several things really bother me.  The first is that I think that some on the BOCS now see a colleague as being all tumbled in to what was being said on the blogs.  I don’t think that Mr. Candland was part of the blog gossip.  I hope I am right.   I think he learned to avoid that like the plague.  Additionally, it seems that Mr. Candland’s reform efforts really weren’t finger pointing but seeking correction where correction was needed.  I say that as one who didn’t even like his entire resolution.  However, it was a start–a place to begin discussion.  Unfortunately, the  BOCS felt it was a place to end discussion, so we now have perfectly ridiculous rules that don’t address any of the problems.

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VA Tech fined over failed campus security in 2007 massacre

As VA Tech continues to heal from the worst massacre in US history, they got dealt another blow, this time by the US Department of Education.  According to the Washington Post:

The federal government said Tuesday that it plans to issue the maximum possible fine against Virginia Tech — $55,000 — for violations of a campus safety law in connection with the 2007 shooting rampage that left more than 30 students and teachers dead.

A federal official wrote in a letter to Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger that the penalty for failing to provide timely warnings about the threat to the campus on the day of the massacre should be greater.

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8.9 Earthquake Hits Japan

An 8.9 earthquake hit Japan near Tokyo during the night.   It was around 2 in the afternoon in Japan when the earthquake hit.  The epicenter was right off the coast.  Tsunamis have hit Japan.  Hawaii and the entire Pacific Basin are under tsunami warning meaning imminent danger.  Our entire west coast line, Canada and Alaska are under this warning. 

Pictures coming in of the tsunamis already hitting Japan have been in TV all night.  This earthquake is the largest in Japan since such data has been recorded. 

We will use this thread for updates. 

Post-Shooting Reflections

Yesterday became one of those days that Americans dread.  Something inside someone, some stranger, goes terribly out of wack and the end result is rampage and carnage and death.  Such was the case yesterday where Congresswoman Gabby Giffords met with constituents at a Safeway in Tucson, right there in her district.  By 10 am Arizona time, 6 people lay dead and the congresswoman was fighting for her life along with 6 other people.  One of the dead was a federal judge.  A 9 year old child was shot in the chest at point blank range.

It is all too easy to start analyzing and blaming.  Human nature kicks in real quickly when events like this happen.  All of us start trying to make sense out of something so tragically senseless. 

According to moonhowlings poster Ken Anderson: 

On the web, the TV, everywhere the political characters are playing the same game. Left wing jumps to connect this to GOP/TEA political tactics of the last 2 years. GOP/TEA jumps to cover their butts. Nobody knows the guy’s motivations, but that doesn’t matter. Everything is just another opportunity to take a shot at the “enemies” on the other side of the aisle.

Six people have lost their lives. Could we wait a day at least before we start to calculate the political fallout?

I think Ken Anderson is right.  Let’s not start pointing fingers and casting blame on anyone other than the shooter.  From all indications, the shooter was a seriously emotional disturbed individual and not part of any political movement.  That fact, however, does not remove us from any responsibility as far as what we say and how we say it.  Casting aspersions on our political opponents, Giffords’ opponents, or those we feel have made threats in the past simply proves nothing and is unproductive, especially on a blog. 

Perhaps this is should be a time where we come together to try to resolve our differences rather than create an even wider chasm.  It appears that is exactly what our elected officials in Congress are doing.  All voting has been suspended for next week.   Hopefully some peace and understanding will emerge from this tragedy.

Our congress men and women should be able to move about freely in a free society.  When they are unable to do this, perhaps we are no longer a democracy. 

CNN Spotlights PWC, sans Corey Stewart

Finally, another look at PWC, three years later, without editorializing by Corey Stewart. Hear an immigrant, Latino businessman Carlos Castro, and Chief Deane three years after the Immigration Resolution was first introduced.

While this video shows the Prince William County story from a perspective that doesn’t involve Corey Stewart making a name for himself, we still aren’t seeing the whole story.

What is still missing from the discussion is that the initial Immigration Resolution is NOT in affect and it is NOT the same as sb 1070. Until this fact is brought out, the conversation really goes no where and the story is only half told.

Channel 4 News: Pol Wants ‘Zona-Style Illegal Immigration Law for Virginia

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From NBC Washington:

The chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors is proposing an Arizona-style illegal immigration law for the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.

The tough law on illegal immigration the county adopted a couple of years ago isn’t sufficient, according to a statement released by Corey Stewart for Chairman.

“We saw a 37 percent drop in violent crime in the first two years of enforcement and overall crime is at a 15-year low,” he said. “But we have anecdotally known, since day one, that the criminal aliens that fled were just going to neighboring jurisdictions.”

So Stewart has started a petition online and a Facebook page for The Virginia Rule of Law Campaign. He has promised a draft of the law soon

It would give police more power to identify and deport illegal immigrants, impose harsh penalties for illegal immigrants, and crack down on day labor and human smuggling. Jails would release illegal immigrants to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement upon completion of their sentences. Police would be allowed to make arrests without warrants if they believed those arrests could lead to deportations. And individual cities and counties would be barred from interfering.

Prince William County’s controversial law doesn’t make it a crime to be an illegal immigrant in the county, but it allows police to check immigration status of people who’ve been arrested, which Stewart credits for the drop in violent crime and fewer illegal immigrants in the county.

Those who campaigned for the law, which took effect in July 2008, argued that the county had to take care of itself if the commonwealth and country weren’t going to address illegal immigration. Stewart’s latest campaign takes the same position.

“As long as the federal government shows no interest in securing the border and no interest in internal enforcement to promote self-deportation, then states and localities will have to pick up the slack,” he said.

And he intends to use the 2011 election to pressure the General Assembly into passing his Virginia Rule of Law next session.

 

Corey’s Updated Website:

 The Virginia Rule of Law Act

  • Enhance Police Powers to Capture, Detain, and help Deport Criminal Aliens
    • Direct Virginia law enforcement officials to ascertain, in any lawful contact, the legal presence of an individual, when practicable.
    • Direct Virginia jails to release criminal aliens to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after serving their sentence.
    • Allow law enforcement officials to arrest illegals without warrant if they have reasonable suspicion that the arrest would make them removable from the United States.
  • Virginia Criminal Penalties for Illegal Aliens
    • Make it a violation of Virginia law to fail to complete alien registration documents.
    • Impose harsh penalties for terrorists and illegals caught with illegal drugs and deadly weapons.
  • Outlaw Sanctuary Policies
    • Prohibit cities and counties from preventing law enforcement officials from inquiring about legal presence or preventing them from sharing information with ICE.
  • Outlaw Illegal Day Laboring and Public Roadside Solicitation
    • Allow law enforcement officials to break up day laboring operations.
    • Prohibit solicitation along all public roads, crippling illegal day labor sites.
  • Crackdown on Human Smuggling
  • Prohibit smuggling and human trafficking, especially for sexual slavery.
  • The election is in 2011. Corey is attempting to ride the coattails of the  Arizona  anti-immigration law SB1070 (download the law) and capture some of the national attention that Arizona is getting over immigration.  It was announced late this afternoon that the Administration will sue  the State of Arizona over its law that is set to go into effect. July 28, 2010.  I suppose Corey Stewart is jealous of the impending lawsuit that will cost an already cash-strapped Arizona millions it can’t afford to spend.  Does Virginia need to get sued also?

    Corey needs to stop grand-standing and stop the continual embarrassment to Prince William County.   There needs to be no Virginia Rule of Law Act.  There are some extremely serious  violations embedded in that proposal that are  Constitutional violations that even a novice can spot.  No Rule of Law there.  If Stewart wants to be Mr. Rule of Law he needs to obey the law and stop trying to find ways to skirt around it just to get his name in the news.

    From the PWC Police Crime Report:

      RAPE STATISTICS

    RAPE STATISTICS 2005-2009
    Way to go, Corey. Last time I thought about it, rape was a violent crime.
    Down load Crime Reports:
    Crime Report 2008
    Crime Report 2009
     

    Research You Did Not Read in the N & M

    People may not like my politics but I do try to represent what goes onto this blog honestly. I think it is only fair to share this post from Debra Shutika’s blog with the contributors on our blog. It explains a great deal about the study that they did. Apparently, the News and Messenger also set the stage for some very bad press.  

    These women worked hard and deserve to have their point of view heard without the filter of those with not-so-hidden agendas.  If residents of the greater Manassas area  truly want to have their community problems solved, it makes sense, at least to me, to talk with people who at least will listen to you, such as these to researchers.  Please read the entire post before commenting:

    From Debra Shutika:

    To my readers:  

     

    Yesterday a local Virginia newspaper ran a story in response to a a press release regarding research that I and my colleague, Carol Cleaveland, had conducted in Manassas in 2008 and 2009. We are ethnographers, which means we utilize ethnography as our primary research method.  Ethnography is a research method often used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, folklore and sociology, but also in a variety of other fields.  The goal of ethnography is to gather data that is in-depth and from a small group of people.  Usually this would be a local community, a neighborhood, or even a small town.  Data collection is done a number of ways: participant observation (where the researcher lives alongside his or her informants and documents day-to-day life and activities), but also interviews and questionnaires.  The purpose of an ethnographic account is to describe those who are studies (i.e., the people or ethnos) and to document this through writing, thus the term, ethnography. 

     

    We began our work in Manassas in the Weems neighborhood and Sumner Lakes in March 2008.  During that period, we interviewed 100 household that were randomly selected.  These households were non-immigrant households. The householder had to be able to speak English fluently to participate.  The summary of that research is highlighted this statement that I made earlier this year:

     

    “Our research suggests that the changes that have taken place in Manassas in the last 20 years have been unsettling for some residents,” says Debra Lattanzi Shutika, assistant professor of English at Mason. “Many of these residents seemed to be experiencing what I have identified as a type of ‘localized displacement’—they feel out of place in their home community. In some cases, residents told us that they found it difficult to adapt to the changes taking place around them, and that these changes that made their ‘home’ seem unfamiliar.”

    Throughout this phase of the research, we asked residents about a number of changes in their community. What we found is that Manassas had changed significantly over the last 20 years, and many residents viewed those changes as unsettling.  We also discovered that  a majority of the people we talked to had strong negative feelings about immigrants. We interviewed 103 households and then went back and did an additional 30 in-depth interviews.  These ranged from 1-3 hours in length, depending on the informant.

     

    In the second phase of this study, we went into two predominantly Latino neighborhoods and interviewed a non-random sample of residents. There we interviewed 60 people.  These residents reported feeling alienated from the community, and in some cases, extreme fear.  What I told Ms. Chumley when I spoke to her on Monday was, although it was not surprising that an undocumented person would feel frightened by the law, we were not expecting DOCUMENTED LATINOS, of which there are many in the area, to feel this way.  In fact, the responses of the documented indicated that they were just as likely to fear leaving their homes or sending their children out to play as others.  [Note: for reasons of confidentiality, we did not directly ask people about their documentation status.  However, those who were documented were forthcoming about their residency status.]

     

    When I read Ms. Chumley’s article, I was disappointed with her report because she clearly misrepresented our work.  For instance, both Prof. Cleaveland and I told her that we understood the frustrations of Manassas residents who were distressed with changes in their neighborhoods, such as having neighbors who did not cut their grass, had too many cars parked around their homes, and left trash unattended around their homes and on their laws.  For my part, most of the work that I have done in the last 15 years with immigration has focused equally on American-born residents in new destinations of Mexican migration.  I recently published an essay on this, which is linked here.

    In short, I may disagree with some of my informants about their perspectives on immigration, but that is not to say that I don’t think their perspectives should be ignored.  I honestly think that one of the major reasons why immigration has become such a volatile topic is because for too long residents complaints about the changes to their communities and the legitimate problems that come with a rapid increase in an immigrant population have been ignored by their local government. 

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    WaPo Says PWC Immigration Resolution Still Controversial

    The Washington Post printed this story over a week ago. Elena and I are not sure how we missed it. We believe the parallels are important. We have reprinted the entire article by Tara Bahrampour:

    By Tara Bahrampour
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Friday, May 7, 2010

    Three years after the Prince William County board approved an ordinance similar to the controversial immigration legislation passed last month in Arizona, county residents are still arguing about whether it has achieved its intended effects. The results might offer some insight into how Arizona’s new law will play out.

    Special Report: The Battle Over Immigration

    The Prince William ordinance, which initially required police to check the status of detainees they suspected of being undocumented immigrants, raised ire among immigrant advocates and drew sharp criticism from the county police chief, who said it would cost taxpayers more, lead to allegations of racism and erode police-community relations — predictions now being made by opponents of the Arizona law.

    The Prince William ordinance was modified in 2008 amid charges that it was unconstitutional and could lead to racial profiling. In the end, rather than questioning only people they suspected of being undocumented immigrants, officers were directed to question all criminal suspects about their immigration status once an arrest was made.

    The county also participates in the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement “287(g)” program, in which a cadre of police officers are trained and deputized to act as ICE officers in making status checks and referring individuals for deportation.

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    Arizona Follows PWC’s Path, or Does It?

     

    From insidenova.com:

    What’s happening in Arizona is exactly what happened in Prince William, but board Chairman Corey Stewart says outcry and criticism shouldn’t dissuade the state from going forth with tough new immigration laws.

    “Essentially, we were the test case for what’s going on in Arizona,” said Stewart, R-At-Large. “I can tell you the intensity they’re facing is exactly the intensity the board of county supervisors faced, and it came from several corridors … that essentially tried to threaten the county.”

    In late April, Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law new immigration policy giving local law enforcement the authority “to reasonably determine the immigration status of a person involved in a lawful contact [with officials],” according to the summary sheet of S.B. 1070 posted on the state’s website. The lawful contact clause in particular caused concern among civil rights activists who foresaw worst-case scenarios where police would engage in racial profiling and de-mand paperwork proving legal status from, say, pedestrians based on skin color.

    Prince William County’s immigration policy, by contrast, states that police broach the issue of legal presence only after “physical custodial arrest,” according to a June 2008 press release from the police department on the main points of enforcement procedures.[bold mine]

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    VDOT Woes

    Virginia Car Buried in Snow December 2009
    Virginia Car Buried in Snow December 2009

    WARNING:  Temperatures this morning are in the teens.  Roads are treacherous. 12/21/09 (7 am)

    VDOT, our state transportation overlord with those bright orange trucks, rules supreme right now.  It is they who determine who gets plowed and who doesn’t.  They can be found at http://www.virginiadot.org/default_flash.asp  VDOT has announced that some neighborhoods will not be plowed until Wednesday night.  Wednesday night?!

    The cities like Manassas and Manassas Park have their own snow removal.  The county relies on VDOT and those road jockies who are out riding the trucks, plows and tractors  scrapping, dropping, sprinkling , spreading and barricading us back in our driveways. 

    Poor Westgate has had very little plowing since Saturday during the storm.  It is obvious.  Entire blocks can be driven without seeing pavement.  Sudley,  meanwhile, has been plowed.  There are a few rough spots but there are single lane paths through nearly every street.  Sudley Manor and Strasburg, on the other hand, have been scraped clean.  Why can’t those trucks who have made 20 trips up and down Sudley Manor Drive (yea right, snow emergency route…that’s the ticket) go over and take a few swipes at the Westgate roads that look like a white, wintery moon scape? 

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    Fort Hood Memorial

    “No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor,” … “And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice — in this world and the next.”

    “This is a time of war. And yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great American community. It is this fact that makes the tragedy even more painful and even more incomprehensible.”

    President Barack Obama