Columbus Day Will Now Be Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Seattle

The Seattle City Council is replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the city.

The resolution that passed unanimously Monday celebrates the contributions and culture of Native Americans and the indigenous community in Seattle on the second Monday in October, the same day as the federally recognized Columbus Day.

Tribal members and other supporters say the move recognizes the rich history of people who have inhabited the area for centuries.

“This action will allow us to bring into current present day our valuable and rich history, and it’s there for future generations to learn,” said Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Indian Nation on the Olympic Peninsula, who is also president of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians.

“Nobody discovered Seattle, Washington,” she said to a round of applause.

Several Italian-Americans and others objected to the change, saying Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors one group while disregarding the Italian heritage of others.

Columbus Day is a federal holiday that commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus, who was Italian, in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492. It’s not a legal state holiday in Washington.

“We don’t argue with the idea of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We do have a big problem of it coming at the expense of what essentially is Italian Heritage Day,” said Ralph Fascitelli, an Italian-American who lives in Seattle, speaking outside the meeting.

“This is a big insult to those of us of Italian heritage. We feel disrespected,” Fascitelli said. He added, “America wouldn’t be America without Christopher Columbus.”

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray is expected to sign the resolution Oct. 13, his spokesman Jason Kelly said.

The Bellingham City Council also is concerned that Columbus Day offends some Native Americans. It will consider an ordinance Oct. 13 to recognize the second Monday in October as Coast Salish Day.

The Seattle School Board decided last week to have its schools observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the same day as Columbus Day. Earlier this year, Minneapolis also decided to designate that day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. South Dakota, meanwhile, celebrates Native American Day.

Seattle council member Bruce Harrell said he understood the concerns from people in the Italian-American community, but he said, “I make no excuses for this legislation.” He said he co-sponsored the resolution because he believes the city won’t be successful in its social programs and outreach until “we fully recognize the evils of our past.”

Council member Nick Licata, who is Italian-American, said he didn’t see the legislation as taking something away, but rather allowing everyone to celebrate a new day where everyone’s strength is recognized.

David Bean, a member of the Puyallup Tribal Council, told council members the resolution demonstrates that the city values tribal members’ history, culture, welfare and contributions to the community.

[H/T Fox News]

Michael Savage: One Month Left to Save America

New ‘prophetic’ book warns nation ahead of mid-terms.

When Barack Obama introduced himself at the 2004 Democratic National Convention declaring there was only one America – “not a liberal America and a conservative America” and “not a black America and white America” – many instantly envisioned him as a future presidential candidate with a unique heritage and extraordinary rhetorical skills that would enable him to unite a nation divided over political ideology and race.

Not long into his presidency, however, it became apparent to many, including some liberals, that Obama’s leadership and policies had only exacerbated the divisions.

Most attributed his failures to simple incompetence, but Michael Savage saw something much more sinister happening, and in his new book – “Stop the Coming Civil War” – he charges Obama is deliberately dividing the country.

At the time Savage finished the manuscript, several months ago, many continued to mock the provocative notion that any president would purposefully damage the nation.

But recent events, including the flood of Central American illegal aliens and the entry of the Ebola virus to the U.S., have made “Stop the Coming Civil War,” Savage’s 30th book, seem prophetic.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of bewildered Democrats are distancing themselves from Obama.

In his concluding chapter, Savage bluntly states his book, published by Center Street Books, is about “the conflict the current administration is pushing in the name of a broader worldwide liberal revolution.”

“As I see it, the forces of the left are attempting nothing less than a socialist takeover of the world economy and global politics,” he writes.

In an interview with WND, Savage said his publisher recently expressed to him amazement that “everything you said was going to happen or would happen is happening this minute.”

Savage sees it as deductive logic.

“Obama’s been engaged in a civil war from the day he seized the presidency,” Savage told WND. “He said he’s going to transform America. What was that? What was that declaration? It’s a declaration of war against the country’s traditional values and freedoms.”

“It was clear what he was going to do, but everyone was dancing around the golden calf,” he said.

As WND reported, Savage told his listeners last week that Ebola has now come to the U.S. because of Obama’s open-borders policy, which also has allowed once-eradicated diseases to enter through Central American illegal-alien minors who are being placed in public schools nationwide.

Savage said the “worst part of the story” is that if Obama is allowed to continue, “this country doesn’t survive.”

He noted Vice President Joseph Biden’s statement at the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard last Thursday that the post-World War II order is “literally fraying at the seams.”

“What was he trying to say?” Savage asked. “Was he playing like he’s suddenly discovered what he’s done to the country? And now he’s triangulating his opposition to make believe he’s the savior?

“It’s not just a joke,” he told WND. “We’re at the end of the road here. I don’t want to live in a Venezuela under a dictatorship and look back 40 years and say, ‘Why didn’t someone stop him?’”

In January, Savage told his listeners of his work on the book, calling the things he was discovering “frightening” and concluding, “The more I get into it, the worse it looks for us.”

Last chance

Savage, the author of six New York Times bestsellers, said he had no financial or personal need to write another book. His aim, he said, is to warn the nation that the mid-term election one month from now is the only realistic opportunity to stop Obama.

“After 29 books, I don’t need another bestseller,” he told WND. “What I need is the last chance to change the course of human events. I am praying that the people awaken before the election in November.”

Though he described the Republican Party as “tepid,” Savage said “they’re the only chance we have.”

“If every Democrat Socialist Islamist is fired, and the Republicans take the Senate, we can lobby the Republican Party through town hall meetings,” he said. “We can shake them up and make them do what needs to be done.”

The Democrats, on the other hand, Savage said, “are absolutely immune to any lobbying whatsoever,” pointing to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a chief example.

“Are you telling me she is going to listen to the average American about saving the country?” he asked. “Of course not.”

Savage sees his 300-plus referenced pages of his book as a “blueprint for impeachment.”

“I did what the whole Republican Party should have been doing for the last year,” he said.

“You take this book and slap it down in Congress. ‘Here’s the grounds for impeachment. In this blueprint.’ That’s why I want everyone to read the thing,” he said.

Spiritual disease

Savage told WND he was invited to give a few words before the beginning of a Yom Kippur service at a synagogue.

He said he told the large Jewish audience the world “is coming apart at the seams” and people have many reasons to explain what is happening.

Savage asked: “When America was ruled by practicing Christian presidents, wasn’t the world a safer place?”

He said the audience grew quiet.

“They heard me,” he said. “I didn’t have to say that we have an atheist, communist, socialist, anarchist in the White House. All I said is that when we had a practicing Christian in the White House, the world was a safer place.”

“I said there’s a spiritual disease that we’re suffering from, and America put this man in there, and the world is falling apart as a result.”

[H/T WND]

Woman Marries Herself

Over in England, a lonely woman has gotten sick and tired of being lonely. After six years of dating the only person who would date her — herself — she decided to put a ring on it.

Grace Gelder, an artist from London, decided to marry herself in a wedding ceremony with 50 friends and family on a small farm, Elite Daily reports.

Gelder bought her vintage dress only two days before the ceremony. She announced the nuptials with herself and kissed her reflection in a mirror.

“The day was obviously centred on me, the final event being a mirror for me to kiss, but it also felt like I was sharing something very special,” the happy newly-wed told The Guardian. Gelder admitted in the same interview that she had doubts just like every other, “with only a month to go before the wedding, doubts began to creep in. I found myself asking, why was I really doing this? Was it just some vainglorious stunt?”

Gelder received support from family and friends. She told Guardian that her parents are “open-minded,” and got behind the idea quickly.

Gelder tosses the bouquet after her marriage ceremony (Photo: Amy Grubb)

When asked about the ceremony and the meaning behind it, Gelder told Guardian, “I really don’t see it as any kind of feminist statement, but creating a wedding of this kind on my own terms felt incredibly empowering.”

[H/T The Daily Caller]

62 Million People in U.S. Now Speak Languages Other Than English at Home

An all-time high of nearly 62 million U.S. residents – or about one in five people – now speak a language other than English while at home, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found.

The study, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, found 44 percent of those who don’t speak English primarily at home—a total of about 27.2 million—were born in the United States.

CIS’s research director Steven Camarota, the co-author of the report, said that this means the U.S.’s current immigration system is failing to properly assimilate people from foreign countries, and those assimilation problems are carrying over into future generations. Camarota said that can be attributed to all-time high levels of legal immigration with over a million people a year admitted into the U.S. legally, and a new “tolerance” in Washington for the continued surge of illegal immigration.

“It is important to understand that the enormous growth in foreign language use reflects past policy decisions,” Camarota said. “Allowing in over one million new legal immigrants a year and to a lesser extent tolerating illegal immigration has important implications for preserving a common language. For too long we have given little consideration to whether continuing this level of immigration, mostly legal, hinder the assimilation of immigrants and their children.”

The report found there were seven foreign languages other than English that more than a million people speak predominantly inside their homes, Spanish being the most prominent at 38.4 million. Chinese is second with 3 million people in America speaking it as the primary language inside their homes; national Philippines language Tagalog is third, with 1.6 million; Vietnamese fourth, with 1.4 million; French, fifth with 1.3 million; and Korean and Arabic are tied for sixth with 1.1 million each.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than a million people are allowed into the U.S. legally every year—and most of them come from non-English speaking regions in the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A recent previous report from CIS found that a record nearly 2.5 million immigrants from “Predominantly Muslim Countries” reside inside the U.S. now, and there has also been marked growth from places like Asia, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

These immigration policies have huge impact on the American people. Another recent report from CIS found that all job growth from 2000 through 2013 went to immigrants both legal and illegal—and that native-born Americans saw no net increase in employment statistics.

“Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal),” Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote for CIS then. “This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.”

During that timeframe in which Americans suffered economically, but immigrants prospered, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said on the U.S. Senate floor that the federal government handed out 30 million immigrant visas and foreign work permits to people from overseas.

Harvard labor economist George Borjas has argued that increased immigration rates in the latter part of the 20th century reduced wages and employment opportunities for lower-skilled American workers by more than 7 percent, and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow argues that high rates of low-skilled immigration have drastically hurt—and will continue to hurt, if they’re increased more—blacks across the country.

On the high-skilled labor side of immigration, despite pleas from CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, Howard University’s Ron Hira and other experts like University of California-Davis’ Norm Matloff, Rutgers’ Hal Salzman, Georgia State’s Paula Stephan, and Harvard Law’s Michael Teitelbaum argued in a USA Today op-ed this past summer that the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) guest workers flowing into the U.S. are hurting job opportunities and wages for Americans seeking those jobs.

“As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages,” they wrote for USA Today.

The economic impacts are not the only way this surge of immigration hurts Americans. A group of national security leaders each independently said in interviews with Breitbart News that the cultural affects of such immigration policies lead to an increased risk in the United States of terrorism.

“What we need to do is make sure everyone coming into the United States understands who we are and that we are founded on Judeo-Christian values, that there is one rule of law and that’s what’s on the books and it’s not Sharia and we need to make sure we don’t engage in the same kind of mistakes in Europe where they did not engage in assimilation,” former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with Breitbart News.

“[Europe] did not engage in assimilation so you ended up with pockets of decay in the Netherlands,” Hoekstra added. “I’m a native born Dutch guy, so I’m disappointed to see it happen. But where you did not have the assimilation then you have these pockets now where people are saying ‘We want Sharia law here,’ and you end up saying ‘No, no, no, no. That’s not how it works in the Netherlands. That’s not how it works in America.’ We have our sets of values and some things, and you know what, if you find our values and our laws somehow stifling and you can’t believe you can operate within them, then maybe America is not the best place for you to go. There have to be clear expectations for the kinds of behavior for the people who we allow to come into the United States. It’s a privilege; it is not a right.”

Former CIA director James Woolsey, who ran the agency during President Bill Clinton’s first two years, concurred and added that the federal government must stop treating the consequences of radical Islam—which has begun surging into the United States in a manner similar to what Europe is facing now—as “workplace violence.”

“We can’t be effective pretending that a phenomenon doesn’t exist,” Woolsey said in an interview with Breitbart News. “Calling Major [Nidal] Hassan’s murdering of his 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, which you mentioned, when he had business cards saying he was a Jihadi and he was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he murdered them, to have an incident like that and then write as the U.S. government did in its report a characterization of what happened that said nothing at all about Islam or Muslims or Jihad or anything else is just ridiculous. Ray Bradbury’s great book Fahrenheit 451 is a portrait of what a society can be like if it turns into totally rigid political correctness and we are in danger of tilting in that direction.”

All of that is why, according to iconic conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, immigration is much different in today’s environment than it was in previous waves of immigration.

“I do think what makes immigration different today is that immigrants came in the past who embodied the spirit of 1776-a spirit to build this country,” D’Souza said in an interview with Breitbart News. “Now we’re getting some immigrants who far from wanting to pull the bandwagon, just want to sit in the bandwagon-and that’s a big change-not to mention people who actually want to do harm to the country. Look if our government can monitor our every phone call and our every email and our every motion, you can be very sure they have the technology to spot every single person coming across the border. The problem is they don’t want to.”

Polling data from The Polling Company’s Kellyanne Conway in July found that the American people are by and large opposed to the immigration plans offered by President Barack Obama and most plans put forward by Congress. The poll showed that 74 percent of likely voters nationwide believe that the president should not go through with any type of executive action on immigration on his own, while just 21 percent supported such executive action. While 52 percent of self-identified liberals did support Obama going it alone, 75 percent of middle-of-the-road voters oppose him doing so and 90 percent of conservatives oppose it. Among party registrants, 56 percent of Democratic likely voters oppose Obama going it alone, as do 81 percent of independents and 93 percent of Republicans.

Similarly, Conway’s poll asked half of the respondents if they think new jobs should go to U.S.-born workers and legal immigrants already in the country, or to illegal immigrants first—and 89 percent thought American workers and legal immigrants already here should get first priority on jobs, with just 1 percent thinking jobs should go to illegal immigrants and 9 percent didn’t know or refused to answer. Her poll asked the other half of respondents the same question with regards to whether employment should go to U.S.-born workers and legal immigrants already here, or future legal immigrants and got a very similar result: 77 percent believe that people in the U.S. already, legal immigrants and native-born citizens, should have priority for employment and just 4 percent said future legal immigrants should get employment priority, while 19 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.

[H/T Breitbart]

Supreme Court Rejects Appeals from Five States to Prohibit Gay Marriage

The Supreme Court turned away appeals Monday from five states seeking to prohibit same-sex marriages, paving the way for an immediate expansion of gay and lesbian unions.

The justices on Monday did not comment in rejecting appeals from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. No other state cases were currently pending with the high court, but the justices stopped short of resolving for now the question of same-sex marriage nationwide.

The court’s order immediately ends delays on marriage in those states. Couples in six other states — Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming — should be able to get married in short order. Those states would be bound by the same appellate rulings that were put on hold pending the Supreme Court’s review.

That would make same-sex marriage legal in 30 states and the District of Columbia.

Experts and advocates on both sides of the issue believed the justices would step in and decide gay marriage cases this term.

The justices have an obligation to settle an issue of such national importance, not abdicate that responsibility to lower court judges, the advocates said. Opting out of hearing the cases leaves those lower court rulings in place.

Two other appeals courts, in Cincinnati and San Francisco, could issue decisions any time in same-sex marriage cases. Judges in the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit who are weighing pro-gay marriage rulings in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, appeared more likely to rule in favor of state bans than did the 9th Circuit judges in San Francisco, who are considering Idaho and Nevada restrictions on marriage.

It takes just four of the nine justices to vote to hear a case, but it takes a majority of at least five for an eventual ruling. Monday’s opaque order did not indicate how the justices voted on whether to hear the appeals.

[H/T New York Post]