http://www.therightscoop.com/allen-west-we-must-stand-strong-to-ensure-america-is-here-for-generations-to-come/
VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wSTcsgdtCyQ
Posted by The Right Scoop on May 15, 2011 in Politics
Allen West gave another amazing speech in honor of fallen police officers at the sixth annual Palm Beach County Police Memorial Motorcycle Ride. He spoke about defending this exceptional nation that we call America and preserving it for the subsequent generations that come after us. He used the words courage, commitment, conviction, and character to encourage those to stand strong in defending this nation.
I’m telling you, after listening to Allen West speak like this, I’m ready to go get fit and serve under his command. I cannot wait for this man to become President.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Rep. Allen West grills official on new political disclosure requirements for federal contracts
http://www.therightscoop.com/rep-allen-west-grills-official-on-new-political-disclosure-requirements-for-federal-contracts/
Rep. Allen West is trying to understand why the White House is forcing disclosure of political donations prior to federal contracts being awarded:
LISTEN TO THIS WEASEL TRY TO AVOID THE QUESTION
Rep. Allen West is trying to understand why the White House is forcing disclosure of political donations prior to federal contracts being awarded:
LISTEN TO THIS WEASEL TRY TO AVOID THE QUESTION
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Secret's out: spy plane developed in San Diego unveiled
http://www.cbs8.com/story/14613367/secrets-out-spy-plane-developed-in-san-diego-unveiled
AP/News 8) — Northrop Grumman Corp. on Monday unveiled a new type of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, developed in San Diego, that can be flown either robotically or with a pilot aboard.
"I do believe that it's going to be a game changer," said Rick Crooks, Northrop Grumman's program manager for the Firebird.
The defense contractor said the Firebird aircraft would allow the military to simultaneously gather real-time high-definition video, view infrared imagery, use radar and eavesdrop on communications.
Shown in flight test photographs and video released by Northrop Grumman, the Firebird was designed and built by Mojave, California-based Scaled Composites LLC, the builder of cutting-edge airplanes and spacecraft.
The company promoted the aircraft with the certainty of cuts in U.S. defense spending in mind.
"Firebird addresses future budgetary constraints by combining the best of our piloted and unmanned" systems, Paul Meyer, vice president and general manager of advanced programs and technology for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, said in a statement.
Crooks described it as an adaptable system that is highly affordable because of the number of different missions that can be accomplished in a single flight.
"By flying multiple payloads, we service many, many needs simultaneously," Crooks told News 8. "It just gives you an amount of flexibility that is not available in any other platform today."
The company did not say how much it cost to develop the aircraft.
The twin-tailed aircraft has a slender wing spanning 65 feet (19.8 meters) and a pusher-propeller at the rear of its fuselage.
Measuring 34 feet (10.3 meters) long and 9.7 feet (3 meters) high, the aircraft is listed as being capable of reaching a maximum altitude of 30,000 feet (9.1 kilometers) and a maximum endurance of 24 to 40 hours, depending on configuration.
The Firebird will be demonstrated from May 23 to June 3, during a U.S. Joint Forces Command exercise dubbed Empire Challenge 2011. The exercise will be hosted at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., and include locations across the nation and in several other countries
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Holder vs. Holder
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/266657/holder-vs-holder-andrew-c-mccarthy
When it comes to terrorists, the AG is at odds with himself.
Why does the Obama Justice Department seem to have trouble mounting a full-throated, compelling legal defense of Osama bin Laden’s killing? The problem for Eric Holder the attorney general could be Eric Holder the private attorney.
In 2004, Mr. Holder chose to file an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, the al-Qaeda terrorist sent to our country by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a post-9/11 second wave of attacks. In the brief, Holder argued that a commander-in-chief lacks the constitutional authority to do what his boss, the current commander-in-chief, has just done: determine the parameters of the battlefield. By Holder’s lights — at least when the president is not named Obama — an al-Qaeda terrorist must be treated as a criminal defendant, not an enemy combatant, unless he is encountered on a traditional battlefield.
It would be useful if staffers at congressional oversight hearings passed around copies of Holder’s Padilla brief. It is a comprehensive attack on Bush counterterrorism, an enthusiastic endorsement of the law-enforcement approach in vogue during the Clinton era (when Holder was deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who also signed on to the Padilla brief). This might explain why Holder sometimes has difficulty answering seemingly easy questions. That’s what happened this week, when the Senate Judiciary Committee quizzed the attorney general on the lawfulness of the U.S. military’s targeted killing of bin Laden.
This should be a no-brainer, unless you are a transnational progressive, such as those in the Human Rights Watch crowd, which does not concede the primacy of American law when it comes to American government action; or a pedant such as Fox’s Andrew Napolitano, who seems to think the Constitution’s words “declare war” have a talismanic quality, as if Congress were powerless to authorize warfare without uttering them.
A few days after the 9/11 atrocities, Congress — by huge bipartisan margins — enacted a sweeping authorization of the use of military force (AUMF). The AUMF, which was promptly signed by President Bush and has been reaffirmed repeatedly in congressional appropriations signed by Presidents Bush and Obama, states in pertinent part:
The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
Congress could not more clearly have empowered the president to launch military operations against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. No one was more responsible than bin Laden, who — to use the crystal clear AUMF terminology — planned and authorized the suicide-hijackings.
Not only did the AUMF put our nation on a firm war footing, Congress imposed no geographical or situational limitations on combat operations against those determined by the commander-in-chief either to have carried out 9/11 or to have harbored those terrorists. Manifestly, either Pakistan is our ally — as its government and ours both profess — in which case killing bin Laden on its soil is routine (there having been many U.S. strikes against the enemy in Pakistan), or Pakistan was harboring bin Laden in Abbottabad, in which case the AUMF expressly authorizes not only attacks against al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan but against Pakistan itself. Q.E.D.
Except it’s not that simple for Eric Holder the attorney general, because Eric Holder the private lawyer advocated greater legal protections for terrorists.
The attorney general told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the killing of bin Laden “was justified as an act of national self-defense.” But self-defense has nothing to do with it. True, the war is a defensive war in response to an atrocious terrorist attack; that, however, does not make each individual operation by which the war is waged an exercise in self-defense. In fact, had such a suggestion been made by a Bush-administration official, Holder would likely have been outraged: In effect, the self-defense rationale would give wartime presidents exactly the “blank check” the Lawyer Left insists they do not have. No, the operation in which bin Laden was killed was offensive, and rightly so.
As Fox news elaborated, the attorney general also trotted out a second theory:
Holder said it’s lawful to “target an enemy commander in the field,” just as U.S. forces did during World War II when it [sic] shot down a plane carrying Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. Bin Laden was “by my estimation, and the estimation of the Justice Department, a lawful military target, and the operation was conducted consistent with our law [and] with our values.” Bin Laden made no attempts to surrender and there was “no indication he wanted to do that,” Holder said.
Notice that Holder’s defense here rests on the premise that bin Laden was targeted in the field, meaning, on a battlefield. If an enemy combatant is encountered on the battlefield and he does not surrender, he may be killed or captured — it makes no difference whether he was armed, as bin Laden apparently was not.
But hold on: Bin Laden was not confronted on a battlefield. Nor was he, like Admiral Yamamoto, in an aircraft, which theoretically can be a military asset — or even used as a missile, as al-Qaeda has demonstrated. To the contrary, al-Qaeda’s emir was targeted in a residential neighborhood. Though he had some bodyguards, he was in the company of noncombatant women and children.
For most Americans, that does not detract at all from the legitimacy of bin Laden’s killing. This enemy has declared a global jihad against the United States. Al-Qaeda reserves to itself the prerogative to turn any place of its choosing into a battlefield. In fact, it would be perilous not to assume, when encountering al-Qaeda operatives, that this is exactly what they are up to. Their m.o., after all, is to target civilians for mass murder and to hide among civilians in order to frustrate retaliatory strikes. Consequently, it should make no difference that bin Laden was not found on a traditional battlefield — that he was in a residential compound inside a country with which the United States is not at war.
Nevertheless, what is not a problem for most Americans is a problem for Mr. Holder — at least if we’re talking about Eric Holder the prominent Democratic lawyer who filed the Padilla amicus brief, an action that he failed to disclose to the Senate during his confirmation process.
Padilla was apprehended coming off a plane in Chicago. He was unarmed and in an airport, not on a traditional battlefield. Though not an enemy commander like bin Laden or Yamamoto, he was clearly an enemy combatant, and a quite deadly one, given the nature of his mission. Yet President Bush did not authorize his killing. Padilla was taken into custody by law-enforcement agents and later transferred to military custody after being designated an enemy combatant — for which the Lawyer Left lustily rebuked the president.
Plainly, there are some distinctions between the Padilla and bin Laden situations. Not only was Padilla encountered inside our territory (after arriving on a flight from — where else? — Pakistan), he is also an American citizen. But Holder did not limit his argument on behalf of the terrorist to these circumstances. He also forcefully argued that the Bush administration did not have the power to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant because he was not found on a battlefield:
Amici do not question the power of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to detain persons, even citizens, seized on an active field of battle. We recognize that the President has broad authority as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war or threat to the security of our Nation. . . . But the exigencies of the battlefield present a vastly different circumstance than even the bustle of O’Hare Airport. . . . While the government suggests that Padilla was arrested on a “battlefield,” . . . under its standards the “battlefield” against terrorism could extend throughout the world and the “hostilities” could be of indefinite and perhaps undefinable duration. Legal standards developed to deal with traditional wars cannot be imported wholesale into this very different context.
Holder was dangerously wrong. Put aside that no war comes with an expiration date. It was not the Bush administration that extended the battlefield “throughout the world.” The standards in question were set by al-Qaeda. That is no doubt why Congress prudently did not attempt to circumscribe the commander-in-chief’s discretion to determine what the battlefield is. We don’t want terrorists to have any sanctuaries.
This is also precisely why President Obama has “imported wholesale” into his command the traditional concept that a battlefield can be any location where the enemy can conduct operations — which, in al-Qaeda’s case, is any place where its operatives are found. That is the risk a terrorist runs — being an unlawful combatant who flouts laws of war designed to protect civilians, the terrorist must be denied the privileges that reward lawful combatants for conducting warfare honorably.
Contrary to Mr. Holder’s rationalizations about self-defense and “traditional” battlefields, President Obama was well within his power, under the Constitution and Congress’s AUMF, to order bin Laden’s killing in an offensive raid on a residential Pakistani compound. Only an unambiguous surrender by the al-Qaeda leader might have rendered the killing problematic. It was thus curious to find, in the Fox report, Holder’s supposition that, even if bin Laden had surrendered, there would have been a “good basis” for “those very brave Navy SEALs” to shoot bin Laden — “in order to protect themselves and the other people who were in that building,” including “substantial numbers of women and children.”
Protections granted to honorable combatants under the laws of war — many of which the Lawyer Left and the Obama administration have pushed to extend to terrorists — generally hold that when quarter is sought, it must be given. It is “especially forbidden,” instructs Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention, “to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion.” It is, moreover, deemed an egregious violation of international law for a country at war to indicate that no quarter will be given, that it will take no prisoners.
But who knows? Maybe Mr. Holder is evolving.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.He is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A Republican, he is most notable for leading the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others. The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks.[1] He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He resigned from the Justice Department in 2003.
When it comes to terrorists, the AG is at odds with himself.
Why does the Obama Justice Department seem to have trouble mounting a full-throated, compelling legal defense of Osama bin Laden’s killing? The problem for Eric Holder the attorney general could be Eric Holder the private attorney.
In 2004, Mr. Holder chose to file an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, the al-Qaeda terrorist sent to our country by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a post-9/11 second wave of attacks. In the brief, Holder argued that a commander-in-chief lacks the constitutional authority to do what his boss, the current commander-in-chief, has just done: determine the parameters of the battlefield. By Holder’s lights — at least when the president is not named Obama — an al-Qaeda terrorist must be treated as a criminal defendant, not an enemy combatant, unless he is encountered on a traditional battlefield.
It would be useful if staffers at congressional oversight hearings passed around copies of Holder’s Padilla brief. It is a comprehensive attack on Bush counterterrorism, an enthusiastic endorsement of the law-enforcement approach in vogue during the Clinton era (when Holder was deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who also signed on to the Padilla brief). This might explain why Holder sometimes has difficulty answering seemingly easy questions. That’s what happened this week, when the Senate Judiciary Committee quizzed the attorney general on the lawfulness of the U.S. military’s targeted killing of bin Laden.
This should be a no-brainer, unless you are a transnational progressive, such as those in the Human Rights Watch crowd, which does not concede the primacy of American law when it comes to American government action; or a pedant such as Fox’s Andrew Napolitano, who seems to think the Constitution’s words “declare war” have a talismanic quality, as if Congress were powerless to authorize warfare without uttering them.
A few days after the 9/11 atrocities, Congress — by huge bipartisan margins — enacted a sweeping authorization of the use of military force (AUMF). The AUMF, which was promptly signed by President Bush and has been reaffirmed repeatedly in congressional appropriations signed by Presidents Bush and Obama, states in pertinent part:
The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
Congress could not more clearly have empowered the president to launch military operations against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. No one was more responsible than bin Laden, who — to use the crystal clear AUMF terminology — planned and authorized the suicide-hijackings.
Not only did the AUMF put our nation on a firm war footing, Congress imposed no geographical or situational limitations on combat operations against those determined by the commander-in-chief either to have carried out 9/11 or to have harbored those terrorists. Manifestly, either Pakistan is our ally — as its government and ours both profess — in which case killing bin Laden on its soil is routine (there having been many U.S. strikes against the enemy in Pakistan), or Pakistan was harboring bin Laden in Abbottabad, in which case the AUMF expressly authorizes not only attacks against al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan but against Pakistan itself. Q.E.D.
Except it’s not that simple for Eric Holder the attorney general, because Eric Holder the private lawyer advocated greater legal protections for terrorists.
The attorney general told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the killing of bin Laden “was justified as an act of national self-defense.” But self-defense has nothing to do with it. True, the war is a defensive war in response to an atrocious terrorist attack; that, however, does not make each individual operation by which the war is waged an exercise in self-defense. In fact, had such a suggestion been made by a Bush-administration official, Holder would likely have been outraged: In effect, the self-defense rationale would give wartime presidents exactly the “blank check” the Lawyer Left insists they do not have. No, the operation in which bin Laden was killed was offensive, and rightly so.
As Fox news elaborated, the attorney general also trotted out a second theory:
Holder said it’s lawful to “target an enemy commander in the field,” just as U.S. forces did during World War II when it [sic] shot down a plane carrying Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. Bin Laden was “by my estimation, and the estimation of the Justice Department, a lawful military target, and the operation was conducted consistent with our law [and] with our values.” Bin Laden made no attempts to surrender and there was “no indication he wanted to do that,” Holder said.
Notice that Holder’s defense here rests on the premise that bin Laden was targeted in the field, meaning, on a battlefield. If an enemy combatant is encountered on the battlefield and he does not surrender, he may be killed or captured — it makes no difference whether he was armed, as bin Laden apparently was not.
But hold on: Bin Laden was not confronted on a battlefield. Nor was he, like Admiral Yamamoto, in an aircraft, which theoretically can be a military asset — or even used as a missile, as al-Qaeda has demonstrated. To the contrary, al-Qaeda’s emir was targeted in a residential neighborhood. Though he had some bodyguards, he was in the company of noncombatant women and children.
For most Americans, that does not detract at all from the legitimacy of bin Laden’s killing. This enemy has declared a global jihad against the United States. Al-Qaeda reserves to itself the prerogative to turn any place of its choosing into a battlefield. In fact, it would be perilous not to assume, when encountering al-Qaeda operatives, that this is exactly what they are up to. Their m.o., after all, is to target civilians for mass murder and to hide among civilians in order to frustrate retaliatory strikes. Consequently, it should make no difference that bin Laden was not found on a traditional battlefield — that he was in a residential compound inside a country with which the United States is not at war.
Nevertheless, what is not a problem for most Americans is a problem for Mr. Holder — at least if we’re talking about Eric Holder the prominent Democratic lawyer who filed the Padilla amicus brief, an action that he failed to disclose to the Senate during his confirmation process.
Padilla was apprehended coming off a plane in Chicago. He was unarmed and in an airport, not on a traditional battlefield. Though not an enemy commander like bin Laden or Yamamoto, he was clearly an enemy combatant, and a quite deadly one, given the nature of his mission. Yet President Bush did not authorize his killing. Padilla was taken into custody by law-enforcement agents and later transferred to military custody after being designated an enemy combatant — for which the Lawyer Left lustily rebuked the president.
Plainly, there are some distinctions between the Padilla and bin Laden situations. Not only was Padilla encountered inside our territory (after arriving on a flight from — where else? — Pakistan), he is also an American citizen. But Holder did not limit his argument on behalf of the terrorist to these circumstances. He also forcefully argued that the Bush administration did not have the power to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant because he was not found on a battlefield:
Amici do not question the power of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to detain persons, even citizens, seized on an active field of battle. We recognize that the President has broad authority as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war or threat to the security of our Nation. . . . But the exigencies of the battlefield present a vastly different circumstance than even the bustle of O’Hare Airport. . . . While the government suggests that Padilla was arrested on a “battlefield,” . . . under its standards the “battlefield” against terrorism could extend throughout the world and the “hostilities” could be of indefinite and perhaps undefinable duration. Legal standards developed to deal with traditional wars cannot be imported wholesale into this very different context.
Holder was dangerously wrong. Put aside that no war comes with an expiration date. It was not the Bush administration that extended the battlefield “throughout the world.” The standards in question were set by al-Qaeda. That is no doubt why Congress prudently did not attempt to circumscribe the commander-in-chief’s discretion to determine what the battlefield is. We don’t want terrorists to have any sanctuaries.
This is also precisely why President Obama has “imported wholesale” into his command the traditional concept that a battlefield can be any location where the enemy can conduct operations — which, in al-Qaeda’s case, is any place where its operatives are found. That is the risk a terrorist runs — being an unlawful combatant who flouts laws of war designed to protect civilians, the terrorist must be denied the privileges that reward lawful combatants for conducting warfare honorably.
Contrary to Mr. Holder’s rationalizations about self-defense and “traditional” battlefields, President Obama was well within his power, under the Constitution and Congress’s AUMF, to order bin Laden’s killing in an offensive raid on a residential Pakistani compound. Only an unambiguous surrender by the al-Qaeda leader might have rendered the killing problematic. It was thus curious to find, in the Fox report, Holder’s supposition that, even if bin Laden had surrendered, there would have been a “good basis” for “those very brave Navy SEALs” to shoot bin Laden — “in order to protect themselves and the other people who were in that building,” including “substantial numbers of women and children.”
Protections granted to honorable combatants under the laws of war — many of which the Lawyer Left and the Obama administration have pushed to extend to terrorists — generally hold that when quarter is sought, it must be given. It is “especially forbidden,” instructs Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention, “to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion.” It is, moreover, deemed an egregious violation of international law for a country at war to indicate that no quarter will be given, that it will take no prisoners.
But who knows? Maybe Mr. Holder is evolving.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.He is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A Republican, he is most notable for leading the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others. The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks.[1] He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He resigned from the Justice Department in 2003.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Video: Cops smash window of men who won’t comply at sobriety checkpoint
This comes up every so often. Some person (Half the time it is a female) thinks that they can just sit in the car until the police authority asking for ID gets tired and lets them go.
Not true. In the California Vehicle Code (Traffic law), there is a MISDEMEANOR (means you can spend time in jail for this) that says you must present your license to a police officer upon request.
One quote after the video is right on:
http://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/3649327-Video-Cops-smash-window-of-men-who-wont-comply-at-sobriety-checkpoint/
VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTG5rWF_Uis&feature=player_embedded
The two men inside, Angel Naverrete and Daniel Alfaro, videotaped and narrated the entire exchange
By PoliceOne Staff
ESCONDIDO, Calif. — Police in Escondido, California smashed the window of a car during a sobriety checkpoint in which the drivers refused to hand over identification or roll down their vehicle’s window.
The two men inside, Angel Naverrete and Daniel Alfaro, videotaped and narrated the entire exchange. The video will be at the center of a trial that will take place this summer.
During the traffic stop, which took place in February, the two men can be heard repeatedly asking the officer, who gave several warnings before eventually breaking the window, for his name and badge number.
Here’s a bit of what the passenger had to say. You should watch the video below to get the full experience:
"Officer, can I get your name and your badge number, please? Are you refusing to give me your name and your badge number? Are we free to go? Can you tell us the reason we are being detained. I need to know your badge number and your name officer."
==============================================================================
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_f0969a83-229c-57c1-be70-be71a37c17ee.html
A video of two young men being arrested at an Escondido sobriety checkpoint in February shows police breaking the window of their car after the driver refuses repeated requests to roll down his window and show his driver's license.
The North County Times obtained a copy of the video on Tuesday from one of the attorneys for the men. It shows the driver, Angel Navarrete, and his passenger, Daniel Alfaro, as they drive to the checkpoint Feb. 11.
Navarrete and Alfaro, both of whom live in Escondido, were arrested and charged with resisting a police officer. Both men pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charge on March 29 in Vista Superior Court. The driver had a valid license and was not intoxicated.
The video is part of the evidence in the case against the two men. It was released by the San Diego County district attorney's office to the defense attorneys, one of whom provided the video to the North County Times.
Anti-checkpoint activists have held numerous protests near the traffic checks warning drivers of the operations. They have accused the Police Department of harassing them because officers have videotaped and photographed protesters and asked them to move away from certain locations.
Alfaro is affiliated with Alianza Comunitaria (Community Alliance), a North County-based group that opposes checkpoints and immigration raids.
The seven-minute video taken by Alfaro, who was the passenger, appears to show that the two men planned to challenge the checkpoint by refusing to provide their driver's licenses. It shows the driver asking the passenger in Spanish what to say if asked for his driver's license.
"Nothing," the passenger answers. "The same thing, 'Am I being detained?'"
The district attorney's office and the Escondido Police Department declined to comment on the incident, saying the case is in litigation.
Victor Torres, an attorney representing Navarrete who provided a copy of the video, said his client did nothing wrong.
"There is no reason for this," Torres said regarding the arrest and the misdemeanor charge against his client.
The video, taken from inside the vehicle that night, is dark, grainy and has poor sound quality. But it provides a telling picture of what happened during the incident.
When the driver encounters the police officer at the checkpoint, he greets the officer. The driver's side window is lowered about 2 inches. Here is the conversation that follows:
Navarrete: "How are you doing?"
Officer: "Can you roll down your window?"
Navarrete: "I can hear you just fine."
Officer: "I want you to roll the window down."
Navarrete: "Why is that, sir?"
Officer: "Because I'm going to break it if you don't open it."
Navarrete: "Go ahead."
Officer "I'm sorry?"
Navarrete: "Go ahead."
Officer: "Go ahead and break it?"
Navarrete: "It's up to you.
Am I being detained or am I free to go?"
Officer: "You are not free to go."
Navarrete: "So am I being detained?"
Officer: "You are being detained."
Attorneys for the two men said they plan to argue in court that they were illegally detained because they had complied with what they were told to do, up to the point where the officer said they were detained.
Isaac Blumberg, an attorney representing Alfaro, said the window was rolled down enough to have a conversation.
"I contend that they did comply," Blumberg said.
The officers at the checkpoint did not ask the driver to show his driver's license until after both men were detained, Blumberg said.
The sound on the video is distorted and it is difficult to understand what the officer outside the vehicle said, but he appears to wave for another officer, who approaches the vehicle. The second officer appears to explain that the driver is required to show a driver's license or he will be taken to jail, but the exact words are difficult to hear.
Lt. Neil Griffin told the North County Times the day after the checkpoint that an officer asked the driver to provide a license and that the driver made "no attempt of any sort to produce one."
Navarrete repeatedly asks the officers whether he is being detained or whether he is free to go. The officers say he is being detained, according to the video. Navarrete asks why he is being detained.
"Last opportunity," the second officer says.
The second officer then attempts to open the locked driver's side door.
"Go ahead and break it," the second officer says.
The passenger then asks why the officer wants to break the window.
"Because we asked you to roll down the window," the officer says.
Alfaro then repeatedly asks for the officer's name and badge number, but neither officer appears to provide the information.
The video also shows that about two minutes after the incident begins, a police officer drives a patrol car in front of the vehicle, blocking the road.
Navarrete repeatedly asks the officers why they want to see his driver's license if the purpose of the checkpoint is a sobriety checkpoint.
At one point, one of the officers says: "You know why."
About 3 1/2 minutes after arriving at the checkpoint, an officer strikes the window, shattering the glass and then pulling it off toward the exterior of the car. One of the officers then opens the driver's side door, by reaching into the car and pulling the door handle.
In the video, Navarrete can be seen turning off the ignition, unfastening his seat belt and stepping out of the vehicle.
An officer handcuffs Navarrete, who offers no resistance. Another officer then enters the vehicle though the driver's side door and asks Alfaro to open the other door.
Moments later, the video ends.
Police confiscated the video camera and impounded the vehicle.
The district attorney's office provided a copy of the video to the defense attorneys last month.
A hearing on the case is scheduled for June 10, and the misdemeanor trial is scheduled for July 12 at the Vista Courthouse.
Call staff writer Edward Sifuentes at 760-740-3511.
The district attorney provided a copy of the video to the defense attorneys last month.
A hearing on the case is scheduled for June 10, and the misdemeanor trial is scheduled for July 12 at the Vista courthouse.
Call staff writer Edward Sifuentes at 760-740-3511.
Not true. In the California Vehicle Code (Traffic law), there is a MISDEMEANOR (means you can spend time in jail for this) that says you must present your license to a police officer upon request.
One quote after the video is right on:
I am an illegal Mexican from Mexico i live in San Diego and i have been working in California for 21 years now with fake papers but it is clearly marked that the police is conducting an liscence and sobriety check point these 2 guys are clearly interfering with police work these are 2 stupid idiot American-Born-Mexican not Mexicans born in the country of Mexico i am from Durango and American-Born-Mexican are the misery of our Mexican culture don't confuse these Mexicans with real mexicans
http://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/3649327-Video-Cops-smash-window-of-men-who-wont-comply-at-sobriety-checkpoint/
VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTG5rWF_Uis&feature=player_embedded
The two men inside, Angel Naverrete and Daniel Alfaro, videotaped and narrated the entire exchange
By PoliceOne Staff
ESCONDIDO, Calif. — Police in Escondido, California smashed the window of a car during a sobriety checkpoint in which the drivers refused to hand over identification or roll down their vehicle’s window.
The two men inside, Angel Naverrete and Daniel Alfaro, videotaped and narrated the entire exchange. The video will be at the center of a trial that will take place this summer.
During the traffic stop, which took place in February, the two men can be heard repeatedly asking the officer, who gave several warnings before eventually breaking the window, for his name and badge number.
Here’s a bit of what the passenger had to say. You should watch the video below to get the full experience:
"Officer, can I get your name and your badge number, please? Are you refusing to give me your name and your badge number? Are we free to go? Can you tell us the reason we are being detained. I need to know your badge number and your name officer."
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http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/escondido/article_f0969a83-229c-57c1-be70-be71a37c17ee.html
A video of two young men being arrested at an Escondido sobriety checkpoint in February shows police breaking the window of their car after the driver refuses repeated requests to roll down his window and show his driver's license.
The North County Times obtained a copy of the video on Tuesday from one of the attorneys for the men. It shows the driver, Angel Navarrete, and his passenger, Daniel Alfaro, as they drive to the checkpoint Feb. 11.
Navarrete and Alfaro, both of whom live in Escondido, were arrested and charged with resisting a police officer. Both men pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charge on March 29 in Vista Superior Court. The driver had a valid license and was not intoxicated.
The video is part of the evidence in the case against the two men. It was released by the San Diego County district attorney's office to the defense attorneys, one of whom provided the video to the North County Times.
Anti-checkpoint activists have held numerous protests near the traffic checks warning drivers of the operations. They have accused the Police Department of harassing them because officers have videotaped and photographed protesters and asked them to move away from certain locations.
Alfaro is affiliated with Alianza Comunitaria (Community Alliance), a North County-based group that opposes checkpoints and immigration raids.
The seven-minute video taken by Alfaro, who was the passenger, appears to show that the two men planned to challenge the checkpoint by refusing to provide their driver's licenses. It shows the driver asking the passenger in Spanish what to say if asked for his driver's license.
"Nothing," the passenger answers. "The same thing, 'Am I being detained?'"
The district attorney's office and the Escondido Police Department declined to comment on the incident, saying the case is in litigation.
Victor Torres, an attorney representing Navarrete who provided a copy of the video, said his client did nothing wrong.
"There is no reason for this," Torres said regarding the arrest and the misdemeanor charge against his client.
The video, taken from inside the vehicle that night, is dark, grainy and has poor sound quality. But it provides a telling picture of what happened during the incident.
When the driver encounters the police officer at the checkpoint, he greets the officer. The driver's side window is lowered about 2 inches. Here is the conversation that follows:
Navarrete: "How are you doing?"
Officer: "Can you roll down your window?"
Navarrete: "I can hear you just fine."
Officer: "I want you to roll the window down."
Navarrete: "Why is that, sir?"
Officer: "Because I'm going to break it if you don't open it."
Navarrete: "Go ahead."
Officer "I'm sorry?"
Navarrete: "Go ahead."
Officer: "Go ahead and break it?"
Navarrete: "It's up to you.
Am I being detained or am I free to go?"
Officer: "You are not free to go."
Navarrete: "So am I being detained?"
Officer: "You are being detained."
Attorneys for the two men said they plan to argue in court that they were illegally detained because they had complied with what they were told to do, up to the point where the officer said they were detained.
Isaac Blumberg, an attorney representing Alfaro, said the window was rolled down enough to have a conversation.
"I contend that they did comply," Blumberg said.
The officers at the checkpoint did not ask the driver to show his driver's license until after both men were detained, Blumberg said.
The sound on the video is distorted and it is difficult to understand what the officer outside the vehicle said, but he appears to wave for another officer, who approaches the vehicle. The second officer appears to explain that the driver is required to show a driver's license or he will be taken to jail, but the exact words are difficult to hear.
Lt. Neil Griffin told the North County Times the day after the checkpoint that an officer asked the driver to provide a license and that the driver made "no attempt of any sort to produce one."
Navarrete repeatedly asks the officers whether he is being detained or whether he is free to go. The officers say he is being detained, according to the video. Navarrete asks why he is being detained.
"Last opportunity," the second officer says.
The second officer then attempts to open the locked driver's side door.
"Go ahead and break it," the second officer says.
The passenger then asks why the officer wants to break the window.
"Because we asked you to roll down the window," the officer says.
Alfaro then repeatedly asks for the officer's name and badge number, but neither officer appears to provide the information.
The video also shows that about two minutes after the incident begins, a police officer drives a patrol car in front of the vehicle, blocking the road.
Navarrete repeatedly asks the officers why they want to see his driver's license if the purpose of the checkpoint is a sobriety checkpoint.
At one point, one of the officers says: "You know why."
About 3 1/2 minutes after arriving at the checkpoint, an officer strikes the window, shattering the glass and then pulling it off toward the exterior of the car. One of the officers then opens the driver's side door, by reaching into the car and pulling the door handle.
In the video, Navarrete can be seen turning off the ignition, unfastening his seat belt and stepping out of the vehicle.
An officer handcuffs Navarrete, who offers no resistance. Another officer then enters the vehicle though the driver's side door and asks Alfaro to open the other door.
Moments later, the video ends.
Police confiscated the video camera and impounded the vehicle.
The district attorney's office provided a copy of the video to the defense attorneys last month.
A hearing on the case is scheduled for June 10, and the misdemeanor trial is scheduled for July 12 at the Vista Courthouse.
Call staff writer Edward Sifuentes at 760-740-3511.
The district attorney provided a copy of the video to the defense attorneys last month.
A hearing on the case is scheduled for June 10, and the misdemeanor trial is scheduled for July 12 at the Vista courthouse.
Call staff writer Edward Sifuentes at 760-740-3511.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Man (Illegal smuggler) indicted for murder in death of BP agent Brian Terry
http://www.kgun9.com/story/14587769/man-indicted-for-murder-in-death-of-bp-agent-brian-terry
Reporter: Steve Nunez
Web Producer: David Rush
TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - The only person still in custody in connection with the deadly shooting of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was charged with second degree murder. Manuel Osorio-Arellanes waived his court appearance and did not show up. The judge entered a plea of not guilty.
The judge sealed the indictment in the case but the U.S. Attorney's office confirmed to KGUN9 News that Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second degree murder.
Terry was killed in December 2010 in a shootout near Rio Rico. Agents arrested four people near the murder scene including Osorio-Arellanes. He was seriously injured during the shootout. Three suspects were released, but Osorio-Arellanes was charged with illegally re-entering the country.
Shortly after the December 14th shooting, court records showed Osorio-Arellanes told the FBI he raised his gun at the agents but did not shoot when he realized who they were. According the FBI search warrant, Terry died after being shot once in the back.
Last month, a federal judge sealed the court records for Osorio-Arellanes. Bates Butler III is a former U.S. Attorney for Arizona. He is not connected to Terry's murder investigation.
According to Butler, the judge's legal maneuvering to seal the records suggested he may have agreed to murder charges on the condition the feds give him a lesser sentence such as life in prison. Butler claimed Osorio-Arellanes could also be cooperating as a witness but is not the killer.
Defense attorney Clay Hernandez refused the comment after today's arraignment. The judge set the trial date for June 14.
Reporter: Steve Nunez
Web Producer: David Rush
TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - The only person still in custody in connection with the deadly shooting of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was charged with second degree murder. Manuel Osorio-Arellanes waived his court appearance and did not show up. The judge entered a plea of not guilty.
The judge sealed the indictment in the case but the U.S. Attorney's office confirmed to KGUN9 News that Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second degree murder.
Terry was killed in December 2010 in a shootout near Rio Rico. Agents arrested four people near the murder scene including Osorio-Arellanes. He was seriously injured during the shootout. Three suspects were released, but Osorio-Arellanes was charged with illegally re-entering the country.
Shortly after the December 14th shooting, court records showed Osorio-Arellanes told the FBI he raised his gun at the agents but did not shoot when he realized who they were. According the FBI search warrant, Terry died after being shot once in the back.
Last month, a federal judge sealed the court records for Osorio-Arellanes. Bates Butler III is a former U.S. Attorney for Arizona. He is not connected to Terry's murder investigation.
According to Butler, the judge's legal maneuvering to seal the records suggested he may have agreed to murder charges on the condition the feds give him a lesser sentence such as life in prison. Butler claimed Osorio-Arellanes could also be cooperating as a witness but is not the killer.
Defense attorney Clay Hernandez refused the comment after today's arraignment. The judge set the trial date for June 14.
: In the LAPD, the Cream Rarely Rises to the Top
Believe me, from Personal Experience, I can tell you that this is true in most large departments.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/in-the-lapd-the-cream-rarely-rises-to-the-top/?singlepage=true
To Deflect and to Swerve: Inside the not-so-elite ranks of the LAPD's Officers Club..
The next time you watch a movie or television show about the Los Angeles Police Department in which the key figure in an investigation, the real brains of the operation, is depicted as a captain, you’ll know the writer didn’t bother to learn much about the LAPD.
I occasionally receive email from exasperated colleagues in the LAPD. “Dear Jack,” they write, “my commanding officer is . . .” And there then follows one or more descriptive terms from a list that includes the following: a drunk, a philanderer, an egomaniac, a moron, a lunatic.
What suddenly strikes me as I compose this column is that some substantial number of LAPD officers, perhaps even a majority, will read the above and be certain that I am talking about their own commanding officer. And, just as striking, not a single one of the commanding officers who reads it will entertain even a suspicion that I might be talking about him. Self-delusion: it’s not something that’s taught to the LAPD command staff, it just seems to come naturally to most of them.
I am now in the twilight of my police career, having been around longer than only a few dozen of my fellow officers. For reasons I will explain below, I have not risen far in the organization, and from my vantage point near the bottom of the chain of command I have watched as some of my contemporaries and some of those who followed me rose through the ranks to become captains, commanders, and deputy chiefs. I recall with some embarrassment the naïveté I displayed when, as a young cop back in the early ‘80s, I assumed — as you may also — that one had to be possessed of above average intelligence and keen law enforcement skills to ascend to the lofty levels of the department. It didn’t take long before I was disabused of this notion.
I spoke with a colleague not long ago, a man I had worked with in an earlier assignment and whom I knew to be an outstanding police officer and a first-rate field supervisor. He had taken the lieutenant’s exam, and I asked him how he had fared when the final list for promotion was published. “Not well,” he said. “I probably won’t make it on this list.” When I asked him where he thought he had stumbled in the process, he just shrugged and said, “I guess I’m not in the Club.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “the Club.” Within the LAPD, the Club is the informal society to which anyone aspiring to rise into the department’s command ranks must belong. There is no roster of the Club’s members, there is no clubhouse or headquarters, and as far as I know the members do not greet each other with some secret handshake. But, as in any exclusive club, each member knows all of the others, and they take great pains to limit the membership to those who share their views and experiences. Only rarely does some interloper manage to sneak through the various levels of scrutiny to the point that he can join the Club and cause trouble.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the Los Angeles Police Department, with a large circle representing the entire department and smaller ones depicting the various entities within, you would see the following: If one of the smaller circles represents the brightest and most capable police officers, detectives, and field supervisors, and another, larger, circle represents the administrative bureaucracy, the members of which in their daily duties have only tangential connection to real police work, you would see that the circles barely, almost imperceptibly intersect. And if another small circle represents the command staff, i.e. the Club, you would see that it broadly intersects with the bureaucrats while barely touching the one containing the best cops.
How can this be, you ask. Doesn’t the cream rise to the top?
No, it doesn’t. Not usually, anyway.
Like most organizations, perhaps like your own workplace, the LAPD is governed by the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the work is performed by 20 percent of the personnel. With only the rarest exception, it is from the other 80 percent that the command officers are produced. The reason for this is simple. The police officers in that 20 percent, the best the department has to offer, enjoy doing police work and prefer to continue doing it for the duration of their careers. And the farther one rises in the command structure, the more removed one becomes from actual police work. Of that hard-working 20 percent, only a very few advance beyond the rank of lieutenant, for it is above that rank that the “climber” completes his inexorable transition from cop to that lowliest species of police fauna, house-mouse. But for the uniform, badge, and gun, he becomes indistinguishable from any other office-bound bureaucrat.
When they graduate from the police academy and have worked the streets for some time, members of the Club learn that they are not and will never be part of that 20 percent, for they simply lack the skills that mark the best police officers. What they find they are skilled at, however, is learning the esoterica of the police bureaucracy and taking tests by which such knowledge is measured. And in the Los Angeles Police Department, the term “esoterica” is stretched to almost unfathomable lengths. For example, there once appeared on an LAPD promotional exam a question about how long the lights should be allowed to be kept on in an unoccupied room. (Yes, there is a section in the LAPD manual that governs such things.) You wouldn’t want to work for the person who got that question right.
Problems inevitably arise when commanding officer positions are filled with people who know everything about when to turn the lights off but very little about how to arrest and prosecute a lawbreaker. The LAPD is broken up into 21 patrol areas and several specialized divisions. Each patrol area has two captains, the area commanding officer and the patrol captain. The specialized divisions each have a single commanding officer. If an area C.O. is one of the truly talented captains on the department, chances are the patrol captain of that division is somehow deficient. The problem is that there aren’t enough outstanding captains to balance out all of the deficient ones, with the sad consequence that some areas are burdened with two lackluster people running the show.
Such an arrangement might not result in disaster if the area’s lieutenants, sergeants, and senior detectives are squared away. But if two ineffectual captains are left in place for too long, their most talented subordinates seek transfers to more desirable assignments. And when all the good mid-level supervisors have gone, the cops on the street, even the 20-percenters, take it in the neck and start begging for transfers too. So what ends up happening is that the weakest captains get shuffled around quite a bit, seldom remaining in one place long enough to cause lasting damage to morale.
Another way the LAPD tries to minimize the impact of incompetent leadership is by placing some of the weakest captains in specialized divisions, where lieutenants and senior detectives in effect run the operation while doing their best to ignore the current drunk, philanderer, egomaniac, moron, or lunatic who happens to occupy the C.O.’s office. The lower-ranking personnel at these divisions, many of whom have devoted years and years to their specialization, are more inclined to suffer fools gladly (or at least silently), so they are less likely to bring about the disruptions that accompany mass requests for transfers. You can hear these people muttering to themselves in the hallways: “This too shall pass.”
Many years ago I was offered an opportunity to join the Club, the acceptance of which would have required me to work in some dank cubicle on the 6th floor of Parker Center, the old LAPD headquarters building, where I would have daily contact with all the departments mucky-mucks. Had I accepted the offer I might be a mucky-muck myself today, a captain or even higher, but I turned it down. I have no regrets. I liked being a cop, and I still do.
“Jack Dunphy” is the pseudonym of an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
CINCO DE MAYO: Another Phony Festivity Propped Up by the Left
"To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men." Abraham Lincoln
CINCO DE MAYO: Another Phony Festivity Propped Up by the Left
By Rene Guerra May 3, 2011
INTRODUCTION
With Cinco de Mayo just two days away--May 5th, that is-- this is an opportune time to make
a few comments on some inaccuracies about the ethnic and historic values attributed to that festivity.
And such comments are also warranted particularly in view of the ulterior purposes some pursue out of Cinco de Mayo.
Chicano and Mexican irredentists use Cinco de Mayo to foment the zany idea of the creation of what they call Aztlán* and then return the Aztlán territory to Mexico; and the hardcore Left uses the resulting agitation to balkanize America even further, this time along ethnic fissures the hardcore Left deepens on purpose.
---* Aztlán is accurately explained by Wikipedia as: "From Nahuatl: Aztlán, pronounced [ˈastɬaːn]) is the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica [From central Mexico down-south to Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua]. Aztec is the Nahuatl word for "people from Aztlan". Aztlanistas are Chicano and Mexican irredentists who seek to re-populate with Chicanos and Mexicans, legal or illegal, a vast region of the United States, secede it --some think through ballots, others, through bullets-- under the name of Aztlán, and then annex it to Mexico. This new Aztlán would encompass California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah. Prominent Chicano California Democrat politicians, such as former California State Assembly Speaker and Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, militated in MEChA, which stands for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano deAztlán (Chicano = American citizens of Mexican descend), the epitome of all Aztlanista organizations. The two Democrats have never repudiated it. They support illegal immigration.
It is opportune as well to comment on the interpretation that some groups in the United States give to Cinco de Mayo for the benefit of their own demagogic interests the ones, and for their traitorous interests the others.
Anyone who has lived in Mexico and learned about Mexican civic festivities of significance gets really mystified by the convoluted meaning that those groups have given to Cinco de Mayo here in the U.S.A. The inordinate hoopla surrounding the celebration on this side of the border perplexes Mexican nationals visiting the U.S., and non-Mexican Hispanics newly arriving in the U.S.A. don't connect with the celebration at all.
Of course, Aztlán will never materialize, unless one of the several internal or external forces attempting to undo America succeeds...and America is then regressed back to the agricultural age, such as it would happen, for example, if nuked (e.g., either Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan or Iran facilitating --either by volition or dereliction-- portable nuclear-bombs to Islamist mass-murderous terrorists, particularly now that Obama bin-Laden was killed). In such circumstances, America depending so much on electronic-wizardry would be rendered so helpless, just from the resulting EMP, that all hyenas and buzzards now circling around her would jump on the carrion that America would have then become; Mexico, of course, would then "reclaim" Aztlán.
The gist about Aztlán is, however, that --aside either its absurdity or its feasibility-- the Aztlán theme is being used by the hardcore Left either directly or through its main front, the DemocRat Party (along with its proxies deeply embedded in the media, academia, entertainment, the intelligentsia, organized labor and "liberation theology" religion, plus hundreds of ancillary fronts), to balkanize America even further, to then use such balkanization as fuel to exacerbate their preferred way of politicking: ethnic and class warfare. That's why the hardcore Left --including the entire high hierarchy and a huge sector of what is the ideological marrow of the DemocRat Party-- support balkanizing-themes such as Aztlán.
It is withing this context that all what follows must be understood.
ETHNICITY OF CINCO DE MAYO
Cinco de Mayo does not appeal to all Hispanics; it appeals only to those of Mexican ancestry, which includes Mexican nationals and Americans of Mexican ethnicity or Chicanos.
The term Hispanic is much broader in meaning; it encompasses peoples that speak Spanish (Castilian and derivatives) as their native language. This includes countries such as Spain, and all Spanish speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, in addition to people from Mexico, the term Hispanic encompasses people from, for instance, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Honduras, Chile and more than fifteen other Hispanic countries that have nothing to do with Cinco de Mayo. Cinco de Mayo is as alien to the majority of Hispanic ethnicities in the U.S.A. as Saint Patrick's day is to almost all those of European ethnicity.
Put it plainly, to the majority of Hispanic ethnicities in the U.S.A., Cinco de Mayo is just a cheerful springtime occasion to party on Mexico's delicious cuisine and beautiful customs: burritos, tacos, quesadillas, chalupas, enchiladas, cochinita pibil, etc. with a background of picturesque charro parades, colorful folkloric dances and mariachi band (from the French "bande de marriage") music. And nothing more, at all!
http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs065/1102276788567/img/180.jpg
Peoples in the U.S.A. of South American or Caribbean origin do not celebrate it at all.
As for those of Central American origin, only the ones with ties to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador join the party, but mostly because of culinary affinity, for, historically, there has been bad blood between Mexico and Central America. Thus, there is a wide and deep gap between enjoying the enchanting frolics of Cinco de Mayo and the overall-Hispanic ethnicity that some here in the U.S.A. want to deceptively attribute to the festivity.
It fits however to affirm that the 5th of May should mean a lot to all freedom and democracy loving ethnicities that constitute the United States.
On April 10, 1942, a day after General Edward P. King surrendered the American and Filipino troops in Bataan to the Japanese during World War II, the barbaric Japanese forced about 55,000 Filipino and 8,000 American captives to march toward Camp O'Donnell. That was the start of the horridly infamous Death of March of Bataan.
Although the Japanese kept marching, and murdering them along the march, American and Filipino prisoners to Camp O'Donnell from April through mid June, the core of the March survivors completed the torturous trek on April 24. However, the most monstrous passages of that horrid torment did not end until the 5th of May of 1942, a day before the fall of Corregidor to the Japanese. That's the real Cinco de Mayo to America! That's the 5th of May we all should reflectively and temperately commemorate in somber memory of those defenseless victims of Japanese bestial barbarity. May 5th should be a day for all of us to take a glance at the future of America with deep circumspection and heed.
HISTORY OF CINCO DE MAYO
The meaning that some people in the U.S.A. deceptively and demagogically give to Cinco de Mayo as a great Mexican historic event is based mostly on a fabrication.They claim that the date commemorates a great war victory in Puebla by Mexican ragged peasants over the modern French armies occupying Mexico in support of Emperor Maximilian, an archduke of the Habsburg-Lorraine Austrian house of nobility, and an importation by traitorous monarchist Mexicans facilitated by Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Maximilian was the youngest brother of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I.
The real truth is that there was no such thing as a great defeat of the French at Puebla by anybody, as Mexicans in Mexico very well know, but which most Chicanos here in America and Americans in general have been duped into believing it happened. It was not even a defeat, for the French simply lifted the siege to Puebla and left to conquer other cities.
That's why in Mexico May 5th is only a day of subdued joy memorializing what in reality was just a Pyrrhic achievement of the Mexican army at resisting the siege that a mere minor fraction of the invading French forces had laid to Puebla.
It has to be stressed that the defenders of Puebla were regulars of the well disciplined, trained and armed Mexican army under General Ignacio Saragoza, and not the ragged peasants as widely contended by Cinco de Mayo deceiving promoters here in the U.S.A. It was the same kind of well disciplined Mexican army that, less than 22 years before, had overrun The Alamo under the command of Generalísimo Antonio López de Santana.
What in reality happened at Puebla on May 5, 1862 was just that the French troops lifted the siege to join the rest of the invading army in the pursuit of more valuable targets. After winning decisive real battles nearby, the French came back in full force a year later to seize Puebla on May 17, 1863.
They then took the capital, Mexico City itself, on June 7, 1863, just less than a month after sweeping Puebla's defenders.
Thereafter, almost everything went downhill for the Mexican patriots...until April 10, 1865, the very day after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his defeated, badly beaten army to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. It was then when, just four days before being murdered, none else than Abraham Lincoln --victorious over the South, with a well seasoned and powerful 900,000 strong Union army, irked at France's support for Dixie and outrageous attempts to pool several European countries to intervene militarily in the Civil War, and invoking the Monroe Doctrine-- sent Napoleon III a stern ultimatum to pull his troops out of Mexico.
In a message that Secretary of State William Henry Seward conveyed to Napoleon through the American Consul in Paris, Abe threatened Napoleon with sending, firstly, an expeditionary force to flush out the French troops from Mexico, and, secondly, sending the U.S. Navy, to sink France's Navy ships anchored on the Mexican Atlantic port of Veracruz.
Along with, and to give weight to his warning, Abe also ordered the march of 50,000 troops under the command of the bellicose General Philip H. Sheridan to the banks of the River Grande near Laredo, Texas, and issued orders preparing the Navy to sail south to Veracruz.
Napoleon correctly understood that Lincoln meant business; as a token of his compliance with Abe's ultimatum, Napoleon readily heeded by immediately pulling some small forces throughout the end of 1865. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, kept the pressure on Napoleon.
Goaded even more convincingly by President Johnson and Secretary Seward in a new stern written message issued on February 12 of 1866 demanding the complete withdrawal of all French forces, Napoleon evacuated the bulk of his troops out of Mexico between June 15 and December 18, 1866. He left behind just a rogue force of about 300 French soldiers and foreign mercenaries as palace guards of phony emperor Maximilian.
It must be credited however that before the end of the evacuation, the Mexican republican patriots --armed with guns and ammunition sent by Abe and later by Johnson-- hit very badly the French forces marching to the ports of embarkation. Those were battles of real significance in the sense that the French were punished hard. However, at that stage the French troops were more interested in going back home than in holding ground in Mexican territory.
Among others, there were the great republican battles against and victories over the French at Santa Isabel, Matamoros and Santa Gertrudis. The May 5, 1862 event of Puebla pales in all and every sense to these three great battles. Cinco de Mayo is less than a little blip in the real story of the French occupation of Mexico.
HOW IT ALL STARTED...AND ENDED
The whole mess started after Napoleon III failed in his attempts to enroll England and Russia to intervene along with France in assisting the South in the Civil War. Taking advantage of the fact that the Civil War impeded the United States to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in Mexico or anywhere else in the Americas, he schemed along with Great Britain and Spain --the three, angry unpaid creditors of Mexico's-- the landing of troops on Mexican territory purportedly in retaliation for uncollectable loans Mexico owed them.
Forces of the three countries landed in Mexico in December, 1861. Mexico's constitutional president at that time was Benito Juárez, one of the greatest statesmen that the Western Hemisphere has so far produced, on a par with Washington and Lincoln, a great patriot by heart, a Zapotec Amerindian by blood and --as his pen friend, Abraham Lincoln-- lawyer by training and great statesman by the Providence.
The Juárez's administration had been left penniless after the War of the Reform, a civil war that ran from 1858 through late 1860, aimed at eliminating outrageous abuses of the Mexican oligarchy and the Catholic Church on the majority of pauper Mexicans.
The Mexican Congress suspended payments of the foreign debt on July 17, 1861.
On October 31 of the same year, France, Great Britain and Spain signed the Treaty of London, uniting their efforts to obtain payments from Mexico, by force if necessary, thus mounting the framework behind the military intervention.
Spanish troops stationed in Cuba landed in Veracruz on the 8th of December of 1861. On January 1, 1862, Lincoln advised Juárez that the U.S.A. could not help Mexico because of the Civil War. The British fleet arrived in Veracruz on January 6, and the French, on January 8, 1862. The French fleet took the port of Campeche on the 27th of February.
Although originally Great Britain and Spain went along with Napoleon on the occupation of Veracruz, both the British and the Spanish decided on April 9, 1862, to back off when realizing that Napoleon had duped them into a territorial expansionist adventure of his own.
Taking advantage of the Civil War in the U.S., that is, knowing that Lincoln wouldn't be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, what Napoleon actually wanted was to make of Mexico a French colony. Furthermore, if the South showed solid signs of winning the Civil War, Napoleon had planned that the French troops stationed in Mexico would come in assistance of the Confederates to consolidate their victory.
The ultimate goal of European monarchists --supported by the Vatican and spearheaded by Napoleon III, the Emperor of France-- was to break down the great menace that the United States of America, as a democratic republic, posed to them. Constitutional republicanism and effective democracy were so contagious that by osmosis, capillarity and emulation could infect their monarchic autocracies.
Spain and England pulled their troops from Veracruz on April 24, 1862.
With no more support from Britain and Spain for his adventure in Mexico, Napoleon counted however with the support of collaborationists in the Mexican aristocracy and the Catholic Church. With Veracruz and Campeche in French hands, he went along with his plans to conquer Mexico. A force marched on Puebla submitting it to a siege, while the rest of the French forces marched deep inland.
Puebla --defended by the Mexican army led by General Zaragoza-- proved to be a place hard to take for the limited French forces under General Lorencez. On the 5th of May the French lifted the siege. The French then went on taking Orizaba on June 14, Tampico, on October 23, and Jalapa, on December 23. A French armada bombarded Acapulco to ruins on January 15, 1863. The French then returned and again laid siege on Puebla on March 16 to take it on May 17, and then took Mexico City on June 7.
On June 10, the French appointed a "Superior Junta" composed of Mexican monarchists and Catholic hierarchs. On June 16, the Superior Junta appointed Mexican monarchist General Antonio Almonte provisional President of Mexico.
Maximilan arrived in Mexico City on June 12, 1862.
Since April 10, 1864 France's Napoleon III, with the complicity of Mexican monarchist collaborationists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, had chosen Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico.
On the 10th of July of 1863, the Superior Junta officially proclaimed the Mexican Catholic Empire and offered the crown and title of Emperor to Maximilian, who gingerly accepted, duped by the Mexican collaborationists and Napoleon III.
Republican nationalists supporting Juárez waged a heroic but no more than nagging guerrilla war against the French occupiers and their collaborators. However, during most of this time of struggle, Juárez kept in close touch with Abraham Lincoln who couldn't help until he was freed of the burdens of the Civil War.
By the end of 1866, following the firm ultimatum by Abe to Napoleon, the tens of thousands of French troops occupying Mexico had been already called back to France except for the 300 who stayed behind as Maximilian's palace guard. Abe, followed by his successor Andrew Johnson had, at gun point but without firing a shot, successfully expelled the French from Mexico.
So, once the French troops left Mexico hurriedly --with the tail tucked between their legs, attentively listening to Abe's soft talk, and out of fear of his big stick-- what continued in Mexico was actually a civil war in which Mexican republican patriots kept fighting Mexican monarchist traitorous collaborators. Yes, with the French gone, later battles, larger for that matter, were exclusively between Mexican republican patriots and Mexican collaborationist traitors; that is, between good Mexicans and bad Mexicans.
ONCE LINCOLN AND JOHNSON SPOOKED THE FRENCH OUT OF MEXICO...
The two Mexican bands kept fighting fiercely through the end of 1866 and early 1867.
Finally, on May 15, 1867, in the great Battle of Querétaro, an army of patriots led by Mexican Generals Mariano Escobedo and Ramón Corona took the city of Querétaro --and captured Maximilian himself-- thus defeating an army of collaborationists led by Mexican generals Miguel Miramón, Tomás Mejía and Ramón Méndez. These three generals, like Juárez, were Zapotec Amerindians also, and had advanced through the ranks from mere privates to brigadiers. They, together with Maximilian, were executed on June 19, 1867 at the Cerro de Las Campanas (the Hill of the Bells).
So, being the story of a fictitious great defeat of French troops that, here in the U.S.A., demagogues have concocted and that the Left has embellished to the tilt, Cinco de Mayo really means not too much in Mexican history. Such is indeed the insignificant level of importance that regular Mexicans in Mexico give to the event. Cinco de Mayo pales down to sheer insignificance compared to any other event in the Mexican civic calendar.
The Left, particularly the Democrats, alongside Chicano and Mexican irredentists, lie through their teeth about Cinco de Mayo, portraying it for what it is not. And, capitalizing on the festivity, the Obama regime and the Democrats will agitate around it to the brim to ram us with blanket amnesty for illegals, for the vast majority of them are Mexicans. By the way, 215ners --and, in increasing numbers, regular Americans-- refer to Obama as "The Undocumented Worker in Chief". (215ners = those who demand from Obama unequivocal and unambiguous proof of full compliance with "Constitution 215", i.e., Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution of the United States of America.)
Mexicans in Mexico give a very much greater importance to June 19, 1867, the day Maximilian and his Mexican collaborationist generals were executed; they see it as a day of national vindication and as a vivid warning to budding usurpers and traitors. (Beware, usurpers and traitors!!)
The lesson to be drawn from the events of Cerro de Las Campanas is that the sure fate of both usurpers and collaborators who dare to commit any attempt against Mexican sovereignty is to end up standing in front of a firing-squad.
In Mexico, Cerro de Las Campanas means a lot, as it should. As a mater of fact, among Mexican civic celebrations, the 19th of June is second only to September 16, Independence Day.
Practically, in Mexico, Cinco de Mayo was no more than a modest tool in the propaganda arsenal that the infamous PRI --the racketeering clique that, in the disguise of a political party, ruled Mexico like the mob for 71 long years, from 1929 until 2000-- employed to keep most of Mexicans in perpetual political and moral torpor...and misery. PRI is the acronym in Spanish for Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) a bombastic name used to co-opt the domestic Left into participating in the system...and to participate in the looting of Mexico's national treasure. The Soviet Bloc nomenklaturas were mere child-play compared to the Mexican PRI. But the Democrat nomenklatura in the U.S.A. is well on its way to dwarfing the PRI's.
Much in the same way, leftists and other demagogues in the United States of America, namely Democrats, have made of Cinco de Mayo one more trick, though a formidable one, to brazenly dupe unsuspecting Chicanos with misguided pride, and to subliminally nurture among them ethnic strife in America, based on Mexican nationalistic feelings.
Since the Left has purposely wrecked the K-12 curricula, where at some point in sixth grade or in high school this episode of the history of the Americas should be studied, Americans don't know about all this. And since the vast majority of those who major in History in college are indoctrinated into Leftism, they keep hush regarding all these Mexican historic events.
So, here we are, with this fabrication of a balkanizing festivity being celebrated by great numbers of regular Americans, without suspecting that they are being duped big time, much the way they are duped every year with Earth Day, which was deceptively created to celebrate Lenin's birthday by leftist Democrat U.S. Senator for Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson in 1970.
And that was the real story of Cinco de Mayo: a great fabrication at the service of those who seek the destruction of America from within; that is, the Left and its main front, the Democrat Party of nowadays, alongside Chicano and Mexican irredentists. It was Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, alongside Benito Juarez, who actually got the French out of Mexico, and not a military victory at Puebla that never happened.
CHICANOS COULD SOW A PROMISING FUTURE FOR THEMSELVES
Chicanos should reject being fooled by Cinco de Mayo kind of demagoguery. They should rather keep and cultivate only positive and constructive Mexican traditions --which are rich and beautiful-- and then embrace whatever positive and constructive can be found in abundance in American traditions and thus become a more active and live part of the great American Melting Pot.
Chicanos should stop also other nonsense such as pushing for bilingual "education" for the children of newcomers; bilingual education is a trap that only makes them second class citizens, and underclass, to be manipulated by the Left, particularly by its main front, the Democrat Party. Total immersion in English will help those children much more in their quest to procure a future in America; Spanish should be learned and practiced as a second language only.
They should also stop rallying unconditionally behind the Democrat Party; their absolute allegiance to the Democrats makes them in America pawns to a type of economic, social and political manipulation equivalent to the one that the demagogic big-brother and arch-corrupt PRI inflicted on their parents in Mexico. Bargaining their support for political power and status with both Democrats and Republicans --or with any other entity in the American political spectrum for that matter-- as most Americans do, will help Chicanos reach the place they should have in American politics and in American life, in general.
The only ones in the U.S.A. to gain from keeping Chicanos so intimately tied to Mexico are those who want to perennially keep under-classes in America, under-classes that they can use in their morbid thirst for class warfare: the Left and its main front, the Democrat Party.
As for Cinco de Mayo itself, Chicanos should rather transfer the fire is their hearts to celebrating the 4th of July with great joy, as do Americans of other ancestries: Honduran, Italian, British, Danish, Argentinean, Dutch, Russian, Irish, Latvian, etc.
Chicanos should realize that the 4th of July is not only Independence Day, but also the day when modern-history effective-democracy** was born in the World. Chicanos --and Mexicans, for that matter-- should also acknowledge also that if it hadn't been for the 4th of July, Abe Lincoln and Andy Johnson wouldn't have been around to scare away the French out of Mexico.
**-- Effective-democracy = The best of all types of human societal organization so far devised within the republican kind of societies: A human societal system of individual participation and inclusion in the running of all facets of society given that the people are the supreme sovereign and the government their servant. Such individual participation and inclusion being manifested mainly, but not only, by the effective exercise of universal, free, individual, secret, volitive and counted suffrage.
Besides, as hard as life may be in this country for some Chicanos, at least it isn't as miserable as it is in Mexico for the vast majority of Mexicans, now unraveling into the prospect of becoming a narcocracy, much the same as Colombia had become until a few years ago when the drug cartels were smashed. Such fact is very eloquently asserted by the hundreds of thousands of destitute Mexican crossing the border each year bound for the U.S.
America offers hope for substantial advancement if one works hard and intelligently. Attempting to Mexicanize American politics will absolutely take Chicanos nowhere.
Education, even modest, not to mention a high level one, and intelligent, savvy political activism is what will contribute substantially to making a marked difference for Chicanos.
Therefore, instead of lending themselves to being opiated by the Cinco de Mayo demagoguery of the Democrats, who want to keep Chicanos as an underclass to exploit on election day, and instead of lending themselves also to have their hearts poisoned against America by the traitorous calls from despicable irredentists, what Chicanos should do is to wake up to the happy reality that the good ole U.S.A. is their only fatherland
CINCO DE MAYO: Another Phony Festivity Propped Up by the Left
By Rene Guerra May 3, 2011
INTRODUCTION
With Cinco de Mayo just two days away--May 5th, that is-- this is an opportune time to make
a few comments on some inaccuracies about the ethnic and historic values attributed to that festivity.
And such comments are also warranted particularly in view of the ulterior purposes some pursue out of Cinco de Mayo.
Chicano and Mexican irredentists use Cinco de Mayo to foment the zany idea of the creation of what they call Aztlán* and then return the Aztlán territory to Mexico; and the hardcore Left uses the resulting agitation to balkanize America even further, this time along ethnic fissures the hardcore Left deepens on purpose.
---* Aztlán is accurately explained by Wikipedia as: "From Nahuatl: Aztlán, pronounced [ˈastɬaːn]) is the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica [From central Mexico down-south to Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua]. Aztec is the Nahuatl word for "people from Aztlan". Aztlanistas are Chicano and Mexican irredentists who seek to re-populate with Chicanos and Mexicans, legal or illegal, a vast region of the United States, secede it --some think through ballots, others, through bullets-- under the name of Aztlán, and then annex it to Mexico. This new Aztlán would encompass California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah. Prominent Chicano California Democrat politicians, such as former California State Assembly Speaker and Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, militated in MEChA, which stands for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano deAztlán (Chicano = American citizens of Mexican descend), the epitome of all Aztlanista organizations. The two Democrats have never repudiated it. They support illegal immigration.
It is opportune as well to comment on the interpretation that some groups in the United States give to Cinco de Mayo for the benefit of their own demagogic interests the ones, and for their traitorous interests the others.
Anyone who has lived in Mexico and learned about Mexican civic festivities of significance gets really mystified by the convoluted meaning that those groups have given to Cinco de Mayo here in the U.S.A. The inordinate hoopla surrounding the celebration on this side of the border perplexes Mexican nationals visiting the U.S., and non-Mexican Hispanics newly arriving in the U.S.A. don't connect with the celebration at all.
Of course, Aztlán will never materialize, unless one of the several internal or external forces attempting to undo America succeeds...and America is then regressed back to the agricultural age, such as it would happen, for example, if nuked (e.g., either Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan or Iran facilitating --either by volition or dereliction-- portable nuclear-bombs to Islamist mass-murderous terrorists, particularly now that Obama bin-Laden was killed). In such circumstances, America depending so much on electronic-wizardry would be rendered so helpless, just from the resulting EMP, that all hyenas and buzzards now circling around her would jump on the carrion that America would have then become; Mexico, of course, would then "reclaim" Aztlán.
The gist about Aztlán is, however, that --aside either its absurdity or its feasibility-- the Aztlán theme is being used by the hardcore Left either directly or through its main front, the DemocRat Party (along with its proxies deeply embedded in the media, academia, entertainment, the intelligentsia, organized labor and "liberation theology" religion, plus hundreds of ancillary fronts), to balkanize America even further, to then use such balkanization as fuel to exacerbate their preferred way of politicking: ethnic and class warfare. That's why the hardcore Left --including the entire high hierarchy and a huge sector of what is the ideological marrow of the DemocRat Party-- support balkanizing-themes such as Aztlán.
It is withing this context that all what follows must be understood.
ETHNICITY OF CINCO DE MAYO
Cinco de Mayo does not appeal to all Hispanics; it appeals only to those of Mexican ancestry, which includes Mexican nationals and Americans of Mexican ethnicity or Chicanos.
The term Hispanic is much broader in meaning; it encompasses peoples that speak Spanish (Castilian and derivatives) as their native language. This includes countries such as Spain, and all Spanish speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, in addition to people from Mexico, the term Hispanic encompasses people from, for instance, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Honduras, Chile and more than fifteen other Hispanic countries that have nothing to do with Cinco de Mayo. Cinco de Mayo is as alien to the majority of Hispanic ethnicities in the U.S.A. as Saint Patrick's day is to almost all those of European ethnicity.
Put it plainly, to the majority of Hispanic ethnicities in the U.S.A., Cinco de Mayo is just a cheerful springtime occasion to party on Mexico's delicious cuisine and beautiful customs: burritos, tacos, quesadillas, chalupas, enchiladas, cochinita pibil, etc. with a background of picturesque charro parades, colorful folkloric dances and mariachi band (from the French "bande de marriage") music. And nothing more, at all!
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Peoples in the U.S.A. of South American or Caribbean origin do not celebrate it at all.
As for those of Central American origin, only the ones with ties to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador join the party, but mostly because of culinary affinity, for, historically, there has been bad blood between Mexico and Central America. Thus, there is a wide and deep gap between enjoying the enchanting frolics of Cinco de Mayo and the overall-Hispanic ethnicity that some here in the U.S.A. want to deceptively attribute to the festivity.
It fits however to affirm that the 5th of May should mean a lot to all freedom and democracy loving ethnicities that constitute the United States.
On April 10, 1942, a day after General Edward P. King surrendered the American and Filipino troops in Bataan to the Japanese during World War II, the barbaric Japanese forced about 55,000 Filipino and 8,000 American captives to march toward Camp O'Donnell. That was the start of the horridly infamous Death of March of Bataan.
Although the Japanese kept marching, and murdering them along the march, American and Filipino prisoners to Camp O'Donnell from April through mid June, the core of the March survivors completed the torturous trek on April 24. However, the most monstrous passages of that horrid torment did not end until the 5th of May of 1942, a day before the fall of Corregidor to the Japanese. That's the real Cinco de Mayo to America! That's the 5th of May we all should reflectively and temperately commemorate in somber memory of those defenseless victims of Japanese bestial barbarity. May 5th should be a day for all of us to take a glance at the future of America with deep circumspection and heed.
HISTORY OF CINCO DE MAYO
The meaning that some people in the U.S.A. deceptively and demagogically give to Cinco de Mayo as a great Mexican historic event is based mostly on a fabrication.They claim that the date commemorates a great war victory in Puebla by Mexican ragged peasants over the modern French armies occupying Mexico in support of Emperor Maximilian, an archduke of the Habsburg-Lorraine Austrian house of nobility, and an importation by traitorous monarchist Mexicans facilitated by Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Maximilian was the youngest brother of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I.
The real truth is that there was no such thing as a great defeat of the French at Puebla by anybody, as Mexicans in Mexico very well know, but which most Chicanos here in America and Americans in general have been duped into believing it happened. It was not even a defeat, for the French simply lifted the siege to Puebla and left to conquer other cities.
That's why in Mexico May 5th is only a day of subdued joy memorializing what in reality was just a Pyrrhic achievement of the Mexican army at resisting the siege that a mere minor fraction of the invading French forces had laid to Puebla.
It has to be stressed that the defenders of Puebla were regulars of the well disciplined, trained and armed Mexican army under General Ignacio Saragoza, and not the ragged peasants as widely contended by Cinco de Mayo deceiving promoters here in the U.S.A. It was the same kind of well disciplined Mexican army that, less than 22 years before, had overrun The Alamo under the command of Generalísimo Antonio López de Santana.
What in reality happened at Puebla on May 5, 1862 was just that the French troops lifted the siege to join the rest of the invading army in the pursuit of more valuable targets. After winning decisive real battles nearby, the French came back in full force a year later to seize Puebla on May 17, 1863.
They then took the capital, Mexico City itself, on June 7, 1863, just less than a month after sweeping Puebla's defenders.
Thereafter, almost everything went downhill for the Mexican patriots...until April 10, 1865, the very day after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his defeated, badly beaten army to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. It was then when, just four days before being murdered, none else than Abraham Lincoln --victorious over the South, with a well seasoned and powerful 900,000 strong Union army, irked at France's support for Dixie and outrageous attempts to pool several European countries to intervene militarily in the Civil War, and invoking the Monroe Doctrine-- sent Napoleon III a stern ultimatum to pull his troops out of Mexico.
In a message that Secretary of State William Henry Seward conveyed to Napoleon through the American Consul in Paris, Abe threatened Napoleon with sending, firstly, an expeditionary force to flush out the French troops from Mexico, and, secondly, sending the U.S. Navy, to sink France's Navy ships anchored on the Mexican Atlantic port of Veracruz.
Along with, and to give weight to his warning, Abe also ordered the march of 50,000 troops under the command of the bellicose General Philip H. Sheridan to the banks of the River Grande near Laredo, Texas, and issued orders preparing the Navy to sail south to Veracruz.
Napoleon correctly understood that Lincoln meant business; as a token of his compliance with Abe's ultimatum, Napoleon readily heeded by immediately pulling some small forces throughout the end of 1865. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, kept the pressure on Napoleon.
Goaded even more convincingly by President Johnson and Secretary Seward in a new stern written message issued on February 12 of 1866 demanding the complete withdrawal of all French forces, Napoleon evacuated the bulk of his troops out of Mexico between June 15 and December 18, 1866. He left behind just a rogue force of about 300 French soldiers and foreign mercenaries as palace guards of phony emperor Maximilian.
It must be credited however that before the end of the evacuation, the Mexican republican patriots --armed with guns and ammunition sent by Abe and later by Johnson-- hit very badly the French forces marching to the ports of embarkation. Those were battles of real significance in the sense that the French were punished hard. However, at that stage the French troops were more interested in going back home than in holding ground in Mexican territory.
Among others, there were the great republican battles against and victories over the French at Santa Isabel, Matamoros and Santa Gertrudis. The May 5, 1862 event of Puebla pales in all and every sense to these three great battles. Cinco de Mayo is less than a little blip in the real story of the French occupation of Mexico.
HOW IT ALL STARTED...AND ENDED
The whole mess started after Napoleon III failed in his attempts to enroll England and Russia to intervene along with France in assisting the South in the Civil War. Taking advantage of the fact that the Civil War impeded the United States to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in Mexico or anywhere else in the Americas, he schemed along with Great Britain and Spain --the three, angry unpaid creditors of Mexico's-- the landing of troops on Mexican territory purportedly in retaliation for uncollectable loans Mexico owed them.
Forces of the three countries landed in Mexico in December, 1861. Mexico's constitutional president at that time was Benito Juárez, one of the greatest statesmen that the Western Hemisphere has so far produced, on a par with Washington and Lincoln, a great patriot by heart, a Zapotec Amerindian by blood and --as his pen friend, Abraham Lincoln-- lawyer by training and great statesman by the Providence.
The Juárez's administration had been left penniless after the War of the Reform, a civil war that ran from 1858 through late 1860, aimed at eliminating outrageous abuses of the Mexican oligarchy and the Catholic Church on the majority of pauper Mexicans.
The Mexican Congress suspended payments of the foreign debt on July 17, 1861.
On October 31 of the same year, France, Great Britain and Spain signed the Treaty of London, uniting their efforts to obtain payments from Mexico, by force if necessary, thus mounting the framework behind the military intervention.
Spanish troops stationed in Cuba landed in Veracruz on the 8th of December of 1861. On January 1, 1862, Lincoln advised Juárez that the U.S.A. could not help Mexico because of the Civil War. The British fleet arrived in Veracruz on January 6, and the French, on January 8, 1862. The French fleet took the port of Campeche on the 27th of February.
Although originally Great Britain and Spain went along with Napoleon on the occupation of Veracruz, both the British and the Spanish decided on April 9, 1862, to back off when realizing that Napoleon had duped them into a territorial expansionist adventure of his own.
Taking advantage of the Civil War in the U.S., that is, knowing that Lincoln wouldn't be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, what Napoleon actually wanted was to make of Mexico a French colony. Furthermore, if the South showed solid signs of winning the Civil War, Napoleon had planned that the French troops stationed in Mexico would come in assistance of the Confederates to consolidate their victory.
The ultimate goal of European monarchists --supported by the Vatican and spearheaded by Napoleon III, the Emperor of France-- was to break down the great menace that the United States of America, as a democratic republic, posed to them. Constitutional republicanism and effective democracy were so contagious that by osmosis, capillarity and emulation could infect their monarchic autocracies.
Spain and England pulled their troops from Veracruz on April 24, 1862.
With no more support from Britain and Spain for his adventure in Mexico, Napoleon counted however with the support of collaborationists in the Mexican aristocracy and the Catholic Church. With Veracruz and Campeche in French hands, he went along with his plans to conquer Mexico. A force marched on Puebla submitting it to a siege, while the rest of the French forces marched deep inland.
Puebla --defended by the Mexican army led by General Zaragoza-- proved to be a place hard to take for the limited French forces under General Lorencez. On the 5th of May the French lifted the siege. The French then went on taking Orizaba on June 14, Tampico, on October 23, and Jalapa, on December 23. A French armada bombarded Acapulco to ruins on January 15, 1863. The French then returned and again laid siege on Puebla on March 16 to take it on May 17, and then took Mexico City on June 7.
On June 10, the French appointed a "Superior Junta" composed of Mexican monarchists and Catholic hierarchs. On June 16, the Superior Junta appointed Mexican monarchist General Antonio Almonte provisional President of Mexico.
Maximilan arrived in Mexico City on June 12, 1862.
Since April 10, 1864 France's Napoleon III, with the complicity of Mexican monarchist collaborationists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, had chosen Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico.
On the 10th of July of 1863, the Superior Junta officially proclaimed the Mexican Catholic Empire and offered the crown and title of Emperor to Maximilian, who gingerly accepted, duped by the Mexican collaborationists and Napoleon III.
Republican nationalists supporting Juárez waged a heroic but no more than nagging guerrilla war against the French occupiers and their collaborators. However, during most of this time of struggle, Juárez kept in close touch with Abraham Lincoln who couldn't help until he was freed of the burdens of the Civil War.
By the end of 1866, following the firm ultimatum by Abe to Napoleon, the tens of thousands of French troops occupying Mexico had been already called back to France except for the 300 who stayed behind as Maximilian's palace guard. Abe, followed by his successor Andrew Johnson had, at gun point but without firing a shot, successfully expelled the French from Mexico.
So, once the French troops left Mexico hurriedly --with the tail tucked between their legs, attentively listening to Abe's soft talk, and out of fear of his big stick-- what continued in Mexico was actually a civil war in which Mexican republican patriots kept fighting Mexican monarchist traitorous collaborators. Yes, with the French gone, later battles, larger for that matter, were exclusively between Mexican republican patriots and Mexican collaborationist traitors; that is, between good Mexicans and bad Mexicans.
ONCE LINCOLN AND JOHNSON SPOOKED THE FRENCH OUT OF MEXICO...
The two Mexican bands kept fighting fiercely through the end of 1866 and early 1867.
Finally, on May 15, 1867, in the great Battle of Querétaro, an army of patriots led by Mexican Generals Mariano Escobedo and Ramón Corona took the city of Querétaro --and captured Maximilian himself-- thus defeating an army of collaborationists led by Mexican generals Miguel Miramón, Tomás Mejía and Ramón Méndez. These three generals, like Juárez, were Zapotec Amerindians also, and had advanced through the ranks from mere privates to brigadiers. They, together with Maximilian, were executed on June 19, 1867 at the Cerro de Las Campanas (the Hill of the Bells).
So, being the story of a fictitious great defeat of French troops that, here in the U.S.A., demagogues have concocted and that the Left has embellished to the tilt, Cinco de Mayo really means not too much in Mexican history. Such is indeed the insignificant level of importance that regular Mexicans in Mexico give to the event. Cinco de Mayo pales down to sheer insignificance compared to any other event in the Mexican civic calendar.
The Left, particularly the Democrats, alongside Chicano and Mexican irredentists, lie through their teeth about Cinco de Mayo, portraying it for what it is not. And, capitalizing on the festivity, the Obama regime and the Democrats will agitate around it to the brim to ram us with blanket amnesty for illegals, for the vast majority of them are Mexicans. By the way, 215ners --and, in increasing numbers, regular Americans-- refer to Obama as "The Undocumented Worker in Chief". (215ners = those who demand from Obama unequivocal and unambiguous proof of full compliance with "Constitution 215", i.e., Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution of the United States of America.)
Mexicans in Mexico give a very much greater importance to June 19, 1867, the day Maximilian and his Mexican collaborationist generals were executed; they see it as a day of national vindication and as a vivid warning to budding usurpers and traitors. (Beware, usurpers and traitors!!)
The lesson to be drawn from the events of Cerro de Las Campanas is that the sure fate of both usurpers and collaborators who dare to commit any attempt against Mexican sovereignty is to end up standing in front of a firing-squad.
In Mexico, Cerro de Las Campanas means a lot, as it should. As a mater of fact, among Mexican civic celebrations, the 19th of June is second only to September 16, Independence Day.
Practically, in Mexico, Cinco de Mayo was no more than a modest tool in the propaganda arsenal that the infamous PRI --the racketeering clique that, in the disguise of a political party, ruled Mexico like the mob for 71 long years, from 1929 until 2000-- employed to keep most of Mexicans in perpetual political and moral torpor...and misery. PRI is the acronym in Spanish for Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) a bombastic name used to co-opt the domestic Left into participating in the system...and to participate in the looting of Mexico's national treasure. The Soviet Bloc nomenklaturas were mere child-play compared to the Mexican PRI. But the Democrat nomenklatura in the U.S.A. is well on its way to dwarfing the PRI's.
Much in the same way, leftists and other demagogues in the United States of America, namely Democrats, have made of Cinco de Mayo one more trick, though a formidable one, to brazenly dupe unsuspecting Chicanos with misguided pride, and to subliminally nurture among them ethnic strife in America, based on Mexican nationalistic feelings.
Since the Left has purposely wrecked the K-12 curricula, where at some point in sixth grade or in high school this episode of the history of the Americas should be studied, Americans don't know about all this. And since the vast majority of those who major in History in college are indoctrinated into Leftism, they keep hush regarding all these Mexican historic events.
So, here we are, with this fabrication of a balkanizing festivity being celebrated by great numbers of regular Americans, without suspecting that they are being duped big time, much the way they are duped every year with Earth Day, which was deceptively created to celebrate Lenin's birthday by leftist Democrat U.S. Senator for Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson in 1970.
And that was the real story of Cinco de Mayo: a great fabrication at the service of those who seek the destruction of America from within; that is, the Left and its main front, the Democrat Party of nowadays, alongside Chicano and Mexican irredentists. It was Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, alongside Benito Juarez, who actually got the French out of Mexico, and not a military victory at Puebla that never happened.
CHICANOS COULD SOW A PROMISING FUTURE FOR THEMSELVES
Chicanos should reject being fooled by Cinco de Mayo kind of demagoguery. They should rather keep and cultivate only positive and constructive Mexican traditions --which are rich and beautiful-- and then embrace whatever positive and constructive can be found in abundance in American traditions and thus become a more active and live part of the great American Melting Pot.
Chicanos should stop also other nonsense such as pushing for bilingual "education" for the children of newcomers; bilingual education is a trap that only makes them second class citizens, and underclass, to be manipulated by the Left, particularly by its main front, the Democrat Party. Total immersion in English will help those children much more in their quest to procure a future in America; Spanish should be learned and practiced as a second language only.
They should also stop rallying unconditionally behind the Democrat Party; their absolute allegiance to the Democrats makes them in America pawns to a type of economic, social and political manipulation equivalent to the one that the demagogic big-brother and arch-corrupt PRI inflicted on their parents in Mexico. Bargaining their support for political power and status with both Democrats and Republicans --or with any other entity in the American political spectrum for that matter-- as most Americans do, will help Chicanos reach the place they should have in American politics and in American life, in general.
The only ones in the U.S.A. to gain from keeping Chicanos so intimately tied to Mexico are those who want to perennially keep under-classes in America, under-classes that they can use in their morbid thirst for class warfare: the Left and its main front, the Democrat Party.
As for Cinco de Mayo itself, Chicanos should rather transfer the fire is their hearts to celebrating the 4th of July with great joy, as do Americans of other ancestries: Honduran, Italian, British, Danish, Argentinean, Dutch, Russian, Irish, Latvian, etc.
Chicanos should realize that the 4th of July is not only Independence Day, but also the day when modern-history effective-democracy** was born in the World. Chicanos --and Mexicans, for that matter-- should also acknowledge also that if it hadn't been for the 4th of July, Abe Lincoln and Andy Johnson wouldn't have been around to scare away the French out of Mexico.
**-- Effective-democracy = The best of all types of human societal organization so far devised within the republican kind of societies: A human societal system of individual participation and inclusion in the running of all facets of society given that the people are the supreme sovereign and the government their servant. Such individual participation and inclusion being manifested mainly, but not only, by the effective exercise of universal, free, individual, secret, volitive and counted suffrage.
Besides, as hard as life may be in this country for some Chicanos, at least it isn't as miserable as it is in Mexico for the vast majority of Mexicans, now unraveling into the prospect of becoming a narcocracy, much the same as Colombia had become until a few years ago when the drug cartels were smashed. Such fact is very eloquently asserted by the hundreds of thousands of destitute Mexican crossing the border each year bound for the U.S.
America offers hope for substantial advancement if one works hard and intelligently. Attempting to Mexicanize American politics will absolutely take Chicanos nowhere.
Education, even modest, not to mention a high level one, and intelligent, savvy political activism is what will contribute substantially to making a marked difference for Chicanos.
Therefore, instead of lending themselves to being opiated by the Cinco de Mayo demagoguery of the Democrats, who want to keep Chicanos as an underclass to exploit on election day, and instead of lending themselves also to have their hearts poisoned against America by the traitorous calls from despicable irredentists, what Chicanos should do is to wake up to the happy reality that the good ole U.S.A. is their only fatherland
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