politics

Tukwila’s pioneers fought in Civil War </img>

The American Civil War began less than a decade after the first white pioneer settlers came to the Duwamish River Valley and formed Washington Territory. It may appear the war did not have any serious influence on the residents of this then remote area as most settlers were recovering from the Indian conflicts. Several men who served major roles for both the Union and Confederate Armies had been in Washington Territory. Some of the names that are recognizable are Ulysses Grant, George B. McClellan and George Pickett and all of served military assignments in the territory prior to the War. In the 1850s, U.S. Congress approved funding to build a military road from Fort Vancouver to Fort Bellingham.

The army troops worked with local pioneers to help survey the route that ran along the ridgelines on high ground and away from flooding rivers. An example of the type of route taken is being used today and is still known as Military Road which can be driven in one stretch from as far south as Milton and ending in Tukwila. The original road from Seattle to Fort Steilacoom was completed in 1860, the same year Abraham Lincoln was elected president.

Ulysses Grant was assigned in 1852 to Fort Vancouver, Oregon Territory, as quartermaster for the 4th Infantry Regiment. He noted in his journal the Native Americans were “harmless” and they would be peaceful had their homeland not been homesteaded by the white settlers. He also commented how the Klickitat tribe had been once powerful but was negatively impacted by a Smallpox outbreak. Grant resigned his commission from the Army in July 1854 and later accepted the request to return to the Army where he became Commander General of the Union Army with the outbreak of the Civil War. more

Jefferson Davis – unlikely champion for the Pacific Northwest
by Karen Meador

For most people, the phrase Jefferson Davis and the Pacific Northwest sounds like the ultimate historical paradox. But before he became President of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, Davis had had a long career of public service to the United States as a West Point graduate and Army officer, Congressman, Senator, Secretary of War and closest adviser to President Franklin Pierce. Matters concerning the Pacific Northwest commanded his close attention.
As an ardent expansionist, Jefferson Davis was a great supporter of creating a continental nation. From the time he entered Congress in 1845, through his final term in the Senate as Chairman of Military Affairs, he sponsored numerous bills and secured appropriations to promote American settlement of the West. In the 1840s, many in government discounted the value of the remote Oregon Country. Yet, in his first congressional speech, Davis addressed the boundary dispute with Great Britain, calling for the U.S. to assert its claims to the region. Expanding the Army presence along the Oregon Trail and throughout the Northwest, as well as sponsoring numerous surveys, topographical expeditions and scientific studies were among his top priorities.Advocating the initiation and expansion of mail service as well as securing pay increases for soldiers serving in the “Pacific possessions” were also among his efforts.

Jefferson Davis’ most enduring legacy to the Northwest may be his patronage of numerous engineering projects, among them the Pacific railroad surveys. more

Safety for refugees in Tukwila

Tukwila, a suburb of Seattle is a hub of refugee resettlement in that metropolitan area. Safety for refugees is a major issue. An article in The Seattle Times discusses these issues, although only speaks to refugees who feel safe in the city. Perhaps all of those who didn’t feel safe moved out.

…White, black and every shade in between is elbow-to-elbow, eating lunch <at the Tukwila public school>. Somali. Kenyan. Eritrean. Bosnian. Turkish. Korean. Vietnamese. Mexican. Russian. Burmese. Nepali. You need a world map to keep track.
The cultural mash-up is one of the more obvious signs of the global migration that has transformed this once sleepy Seattle suburb into an international city of the future…

…In Tukwila, 62 percent of the population is minority and more than 49 percent speak a language other than English at home, according to the 2010 census.
The New York Times named its school district the single most diverse in the country, with 71 percent minority students.

Tukwila’s diversity is a source of pride here. It’s also a source of challenges for the police, the growing school district and residents facing larger problems: nearly a quarter of the population lives in poverty, compared to 12 percent in Seattle, and Tukwila’s crime rate is the highest in King County…

…The city’s current ethnic makeup is due, in large part, to the efforts of refugee-resettlement agencies, especially the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit agency that helps people fleeing persecution and war.

The IRC’s Seattle office used to place most of its clients in Seattle. But about 10 years ago, Seattle became too expensive and too dangerous, says the agency’s executive director in Seattle, Bob Johnson. A case worker, who lived in Tukwila and knew an apartment manager there, suggested they look south.

Borka Markovic’-Paponjak was living in a refugee camp when the IRC relocated her and her family from Bosnia to Tukwila in April 2007.

“Tukwila was a scary place then,” she says. “There was prostitution, drug dealing, gang fights. Ten days after we arrived, a guy was killed in front of the coffee shop for 20 bucks.”

But Markovic’-Paponjak and her husband both got jobs. The kids thrived at school, and the other Bosnians in the complex formed a tight bond, watching after each other’s children and holding summertime pool parties.

“Now, I don’t have a speck of fear in me,” says Markovic’-Paponjak, who these days owns a home here and helps other refugees at the IRC. “Tukwila is warmer, nicer, willing to help,” she says. “

Each year, about 500 refugees are placed in Tukwila. Once on their feet, many move on, and their foods disappear from the Trading Post’s shelves… more

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Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty III, former White House Chief of Staff for the Clinton administration.

Prior to his tenure in the White House, Mr. McLarty served as Chairman of Arkla, a Fortune 500 natural gas company. During his tenure Arkla grew into the nation’s largest natural gas distributor, with customers in 11 states and significant exploration and pipeline operations. The company was recognized by Forbes and Wall Street Transcript for management excellence, and by other national organizations for environmental initiatives and minority enterprise development. Mr. McLarty began his business career as a third generation participant in McLarty Companies, where he helped build the business his grandfather founded into one of the nation’s largest transportation companies.

Mr. McLarty serves on the boards of a number of corporate and non-profit institutions including Union Pacific, the Acxiom Corporation, the Bush Clinton Katrina Fund, the Council of the Americas, the Inter-American Dialogue, Ford’s Theatre, and the Center for the Study of the Presidency. In addition, he is senior counselor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Senior International Fellow at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

John Brummett: Mack McLarty and amnesty
Published Thursday, September 06, 2001

In case you wondered what became of Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, the former Arkla chairman and the first White House chief of staff and later Latin American liaison for his boyhood friend, Bill Clinton, I need only refer you to international political news.
The article revealed that the man who now is Mexico’s foreign minister, Andres Rozental, buttonholed McLarty at a black-tie affair at Tavern on the Green in New York City in the winter of 2000. The Mexican diplomat persuaded McLarty, now an international consultant in partnership with Henry Kissinger, to become the American chairman of a bilateral commission of political, educational and business leaders to study American-Mexican migration under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation.

The commission’s report, delivered in February by McLarty to Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, recommended a policy commonly referred to, and probably over-stated, as amnesty — meaning a process for legalizing at least some of the millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants gainfully employed in the United States and free of criminal complications except for the basic illegality of their presence. The report became a factor in Bush’s decision to float the idea of amnesty. >>>MORE<<<

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The plan for a Holocaust memorial at the Ohio Statehouse took a big step forward last week when the Artist Selection Committee chose a proposal by Daniel Libeskind, the world-renown architect who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the master plan for the World Trade Center site in New York.

But the Statehouse plan may have taken two steps back, too.

Former Ohio Sen. Richard Finan, now chairman of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board and a skeptic of the project from the beginning, once again raised objections. This time Finan expressed concerns about Libeskind’s design, particularly its use of the six-sided Star of David, the symbol of Judaism.

Finan, who served as president of the Senate from 1997 to 2003, says he’ll bring those concerns to two other committees before they take final votes at meetings scheduled for May and July.

“I think that the Star of David is a religious symbol and religious symbols, we have been told on several occasions, are not permissible on Statehouse grounds,” Finan said in a telephone interview last week.

The state, he points out, fought a years-long legal battle beginning in the late 1990s after then-Gov. George Voinovich proposed that the Ohio seal be engraved at the Statehouse. The seal includes the state motto: “With God, All Things Are Possible.”

The American Civil Liberties Union sued and the resulting legal action, Finan recalls, cost the state between $200,000 and $250,000. >>>MORE<<<




Ohio’s Jewish Population

Estimated Ohio Jewish Population: 149,000
Total Ohio Population: 11,360,000
Estimated Jewish Population (As Percent of Total): 1.30%
City
Jewish Population


Akron (includes Kent)
4000
Athens
100
Butler County (includes Bowling Green, Hamilton, Middletown, Oxford)
900
Canton (includes New Philadelphia)
1450
Cincinnati
22500
Cleveland
81500
Columbus
22000
Dayton
5000
Elyria (includes Oberlin)
155
Lima
180
Lorain
600
Mansfield
150
Marion
125
Sandusky (includes Fremont, Norwalk)
105
Springfield
200
Steubenville
115
Toledo
5900
Wooster
175
Youngstown (includes Warren)
3200
Zanesville
100
Other Ohio Towns
350

Population of Ohio 2012
Ohio in 2012 will reach 11.55 million this year.
Largest cities in Ohio

There are six cities in Ohio with a population of more than 100,000, but only one with more than half a million residents. The largest city in Ohio is Columbus, home to 787,033 people. The next largest city is Cleveland (pop: 396,815), followed by Cincinnati (pop: 296,943) and Toledo (pop: 287,208). The remaining cities with more than 100,000 residents are Akron (pop: 199,110) and Dayton (pop: 141,527).

Interestingly, the cities are wildly different when it comes to demographics. While Columbus is growing rapidly, at a rate of 10% every decade, Cleveland by comparison is losing people at an alarming rate. In 1950, more than 900,000 people lived in Cleveland, and it’s population is declining at a rate similar to decaying cities like Detroit.

03/05/2013 ·
WORST BILL OF WEEK–AB 1266–Democrat Bill to Allow Boys in Gov’t School Girls Showers, Bathrooms and on Girls Team—and Vice Versa

If San Fran Assemblyman Ammiano has his way buys who think they are girls will be allowed to use the girls showers, bathrooms and join the girls basketball team. Girls who think they are boys will be allowed the reverse.

Do you think an eleven year old girl wants to have a twelve year old boy in the showers with her? Do you think boys would enjoy having a fifteen year old girl taking a shower with them?

San Fran is a sick city. Now they want their “openness” to go to your town. The good news is that passing this law will assure many more boys and girls going to private education facilities instead of government social experiments. Would you send your child to this Democrat dream school?

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano

State ordering girls’ locker rooms open to boys

The California State Assembly passed a bill Thursday mandating schools permit boys to play on girls’ athletic teams and utilize the ladies’ locker room if they gender identify as girls – or vice-versa for girls identifying as boys.

The bill’s author, openly homosexual San Francisco Democrat Tom Ammiano, has been an activist for lesbian, “gay,” bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, issues for decades and reportedly became in 1975 the first San Francisco public school teacher to make his homosexuality public.

Ammiano told the Los Angeles Times some parents may be uncomfortable with their children sharing bathrooms with students of a different sex, but he said, “It’s also important to protect our children from prejudice.”

“There’s no trampling of other people’s rights,” he said. “There’s a recognition that other people have the same rights that you do.”

Ammiano cited the case of Eli Erlick, a high school student in Mendocino County who was born male but identifies as female. Ammiano said Erlick was prohibited from participating in girls’ gym classes while in middle school and noted that Erlick’s parents testified in favor of the bill.

By a vote of 46-25, carried without any affirmative votes from Republican lawmakers, the California Assembly passed the bill, AB 1266, which amends Section 221.5 of the state’s Education Code as follows: “A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.”

The bill would affect not only interscholastic sports, but also sex-segregated physical education classes.

An analysis of the bill quoted Ammiano: “When transgender students are denied the opportunity to participate in physical education classes in a manner consistent with their gender identity, they miss out on … important benefits and suffer from stigmatization and isolation.”Read more

This isn't a High School Student, just using as an example.

Alright before you all start calling me closed minded, a bigot, ignorant or whatever choice word you care to throw at me. Listen I have had communication with many gays and transwhatever through out my life, through a job I was working in high school, to having a person I called my best friend when growing up in Elementary/Middle School until she moved away. Fastforward 20 something years and we got back in contact with one another which was great; I later found out she owned a business, which happened to be a nightclub/bar and it wound up being similar to a 'Bird Cage' kind of establishment with the shows and stuff. I have no idea if it is still there, but her and I lost touch with each other again. i guess you'd say we grew apart with things we had in common as teenagers, which wasn't a whole lot anymore. Due to life events. 'our own tragic tales while growing up' etc., but this is completely insane and wrong as anything.

Why should young girls/teens who are already put in an uncomfortable situation for some girls a complete nightmare of having to change in front of a boy who thinks he's a girl? Tell me are these transgenders still anatomically correct with penis still intact, are they taking hormones to grow Boobs? Or are these transwhatevers just dressing up in womans clothing? HOMESCHOOL and Why is it only girls lockerrooms and boys not having to have transgnder chicks or whatever you want to call them in guys locker rooms? What are their Penises not to be seen? I have a bunch more thoughts on this that i can't or won't say.....but WTF is wrong with this country.
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