Berkley CA votes out Marine Corps recruiting stations.

[Gan]

U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., says the City of Berkeley, Calif., no longer deserves federal money.


DeMint was angered after learning that the Berkeley City Council voted this week to tell the U.S. Marine Corps to remove its recruiting station from the city's downtown.

"This is a slap in the face to all brave service men and women and their families," DeMint said in a prepared statement. "The First Amendment gives the City of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money."

"If the city can’t show respect for the Marines that have fought, bled and died for their freedom, Berkeley should not be receiving special taxpayer-funded handouts," he added.

In the meantime, a senior Marine official tells FOX News that the Marine office in Berkeley isn't going anywhere.

"We understand things are different there, but some people just don't get it. This is a part of the military machine that gives them the right to do what they do, but what they are doing is extreme," the official said.

DeMint said he will draft legislation to rescind any earmarks dedicated for the City of Berkeley in the recently passed appropriations bill — which his office tallied to value about $2.1 million. He said that any money taken back would be transferred to the Marines.

DeMint's office provided a preliminary list of items that would be subject to his proposal:

— $975,000 for the University of California at Berkeley, for the Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service, which may include establishing an endowment, and for cataloguing the papers of Congressman Robert Matsui.

— $750,000 for the Berkeley/Albana ferry service.

— $243,000 for the Chez Panisse Foundation, for a school lunch initiative to integrate lessons about wellness, sustainability and nutrition into the academic curriculum.

— $94,000 for a Berkeley public safety interoperability program.

— $87,000 for the Berkeley Unified School District, nutrition education program.

The Marine official, speaking with FOX News on Friday, said Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway scoffed at the news, but there are no plans for to protest the City Council's decisions. There are definitely no plans to move the recruiting station either.

"To actually put something into law that encourages the disruption of a federal office is ridiculous. They are not going to kick a federal office out of its rightful place there, and this is not going to discourage those young patriots who want to be Marines," the official said.

The Berkeley City Council this week voted to tell the Marines their downtown recruiting station is not welcome and "if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome guests," according to The Associated Press.

The council also voted to explore whether a city anti-discrimination law applies to the Marines, with a focus on the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prevents open homosexuality in the military.

The council also voted to give the antiwar group Code Pink a parking space in front of the recruiting office once a week for six months, as well as a protest permit.

The Marine recruiting office in Berkeley has been open for about one year, but has been the subject of recent protests by Code Pink members.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,327466,00.html
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Yay! Another piece of toothless and pointless legislation from the city government of Berkley. A fine example of our taxpayer's money at work. And I wont even get into the topic of what kind of people live in Berkley...

It will be interesting to see if the DeMint legislation will make it through Pelosi's fingers...

I'd love to see the recruiting station hold a 'meet the platoon' day on the same day as Code Pink is to hold their protest.

My money's on the jarheads. ooorah!

[Stanley Burrell]

Damn, they didn't even do this at SUNY Purchase.

You'd figure folks could get their high and mighty kicks trying to talk shit to local recruiters and develop a sense of self-importance rather than flat out banninating them.

That does seem to violate something about one of our amendments, I think.

[Clove]

Yeah. My father is a Marine vet. They're pretty accustomed to being "unwelcome guests". I sincerely doubt they're going anywhere.

[Stanley Burrell]

I'd like to actually see what events led up to this; as I am naive enough to believe there has to be serious internal politics, maybe on behalf of the ...mayor... and local Marine corpse, powerfully played by the higher-ups themselves, that it actually expresses this sort of fundamental change.

I personally dislike recruiters lingering around, but to me, personally, there is no difference between infringing upon their right to assemble (USMC) and express free speech as there is local left wing groups.

I think it almost boils down to a fundamental asset of education where the scales need to be displayed as being balanced and have to express the dichotomy in society to remind us of our freedoms, even if it makes folks butt-hurt.

[Gan]

The City of Berkley has been trying to kick out all military recruiting stations in their city for over a year now.

This is the first legislation thats been passed though, to my knowlege.

[Clove]

I just think it's the hilarious that the City is granting generous access to the area around the office to protesters. Like they'll annoy the Marines away. Isn't Berkley aware that Marines are tasked with securing our embassies? They have a little experience with public protest.

[Warriorbird]

How many Marines are they going to recruit from there anyway?

[Clove]

I think they're only interested in Berkley for their Human Shield Division :D

[TheEschaton]

I wonder why many Americans like free speech but not when it goes against something they believe in?

Hell, if the whole city decided to "tell the Marines to gtfo and that they're not welcome", who cares? They did the same thing in NYC, except it was with the homeless, under our fine recent Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

Edit: Oh, except Giuliani used force to remove the homeless, while in Berkeley, they're just *telling* them to leave.

-TheE-

[Parkbandit]

I wonder why many Americans like free speech but not when it goes against something they believe in?

Hell, if the whole city decided to "tell the Marines to gtfo and that they're not welcome", who cares? They did the same thing in NYC, except it was with the homeless, under our fine recent Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

-TheE-


Last time I checked.. the Homeless weren't trying to recruit people to defend the nation.

If you are homeless in this country.. then you are fucking too stupid to have a place to live. The way we GIVE shit away to people.

Sorry.. I'm working at a HUD housing complex this week.. and the sight of plasma tvs, cadillacs and apartments full of capable people not working have me a tad bit irritated by the liberal method of wealth redisitribution in this country.

[TheEschaton]

Ah yes, the old "If you're homeless, you deserve to be" mantra. I thought they retired that at the end of the Reagan regime.

[Stanley Burrell]

How many Marines are they going to recruit from there anyway?

This is why it's mainly trisomy-21. You could plant trees and build WEED vending machines with all that human resource.

[CrystalTears]

Ah yes, the old "If you're homeless, you deserve to be" mantra. I thought they retired that at the end of the Reagan regime.
Not that all homeless people deserve to be homeless, as that situation sucks on general principle. But there are homeless people that don't try and only want handouts from begging. People who would rather get money from strangers to spend however they want than to walk 100 feet to get food from the soup kitchen.

[TheEschaton]

Funny how people imbued by the naturally tendency to want to be free would do that, huh?

[CrystalTears]

If you want to be free, earn your own fucking money and quit leeching off the people who make their own way. I'd rather that when they beg they not say it's about needing food when the food is available for free within walking distance.

As far as I'm concerned, when someone is not earning their own way and has to live off someone else or the government, their freedom should be curtailed to some degree, as in working at least 6 hours a day, even if it means moving one rock of the yard to the other, rather than sitting on their ass watching TV. Much like when you lived at home and your parents paid the bills and made the rules. Someone living off begging and not paying taxes doesn't deserve to be a "free" American.

[Clove]

If you want to be free, earn your own fucking money and quit leeching off the people who make their own way. I'd rather that when they beg they not say it's about needing food when the food is available for free within walking distance.

I used to walk by a bum in Philly that used to beg for change "to use the internet." - I just had to give him something every day.

[Bobmuhthol]

<<Someone living off begging and not paying taxes doesn't deserve to be a "free" American.>>

Hard to pay taxes when you don't own anything, wtf?

[Clove]

<<Someone living off begging and not paying taxes doesn't deserve to be a "free" American.>>

Hard to pay taxes when you don't own anything, wtf?

Alright smartass. But if illegals can come up here and find something productive to do for compensation (albeit without paying taxes as well), what's stopping the beggars?

[875000]

Hell, if the whole city decided to "tell the Marines to gtfo and that they're not welcome", who cares? They did the same thing in NYC, except it was with the homeless, under our fine recent Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

Edit: Oh, except Giuliani used force to remove the homeless, while in Berkeley, they're just *telling* them to leave.


Oh, you mean the "innocent" sqeegee men?

Two words for you: "broken windows."


Just two years ago [edited to note: 1993] it was considered routine for a visiting motorist to be greeted by a drug addict wielding a blunt instrument and demanding money. It may have been the world's most intimidating welcome ceremony. (Some travelers argued that New York wasn't as bad Kinshasa, Zaire, where soldiers routinely pulled over tourists' cars and extracted money at rifle point. But at least the soldiers weren't smoking crack.) The squeegee men became a national symbol of New York's mean streets! They starred in a commercial for a car-security system. They even became a metaphor for the problems of New York-style municipal government. Indianapolis's Republican Mayor, Stephen Goldsmith, likes to cite them in his speeches on reinventing government. During the 1993 New York campaign, on his way into Manhattan to meet with Giuliani, he watched a squeegee man smear dirty water on his cab's windshield.


"It occurred to me that traditional city government is a lot like a squeegee guy," Goldsmith says. "It's doing a job you don't want it to do. It's doing it badly. And then it's charging you."


To Giuliani, squeegees epitomized New York's moral decay - its propensity far "defining deviancy down," as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it during a luncheon speech in April of 1993. One of Moynihan's listeners at the luncheon was Mayor Dinkins, who became visibly enraged. Giuliani wasn't there, but he got the speech that night from Raymond B. Harding, the Liberal Party leader. "We figured," Giuliani recalls, "that if Dinkins is so insulted by it, we ought to take a look at this speech." Giuliani made "squeegee" a buzz word in his campaign speeches about quality of life. Activists howled - William Kunstler came forth to represent the squeegee men's rights - and newspapers published paeans to these hard-working entrepreneurs. Giuliani was called a bully for picking on them and ignoring the city's real problems.


"It was amazing to me that people thought the squeegee problem wasn't important or couldn't be solved," Giuliani says. "A civilized society can't let people go around the streets intimidating other people. But a weird philosophical thinking had emerged about these quality-of-life issues. If somebody was urinating in the street, the reaction would be, oh, we can't do anything about that. And then the idea would start to develop that there must be some inherent human right to urinate on the street. So the police started ignoring all kinds of offenses. They'd even stand by wined drug deals were going on. The police became highly skilled observers of crime."


The police stopped observing under Giuliani's Commissioner, William Bratton, and the impact has extended far beyond the squeegee men.

In the past two years overall crime has dropped nearly 30 percent, and the rates of robbery and murder have fallen even more sharply, to the lowest level in 25 years. Some of the credit belongs to the Dinkins administration, which hired extra police officer and some of the decline might be due to social trends linked to falling crime in other cities, too. But New York's decline has been much more dramatic than other cities - so sudden and so pronounced that it defies traditional thinking about crime.

http://www.maniform.com/prolix/giue3.htm

[Warriorbird]

The really funny thing was how quick Giuliani threw Bratton under the bus.

[Gan]

The really funny thing was how quick Giuliani threw Bratton under the bus.

That was a conflict of egos. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Warriorbird]

I love conservative on conservative crime.

[Gan]

So what do you call liberal on liberal crime?

[Stanley Burrell]

Iraq.

[Parkbandit]

Ah yes, the old "If you're homeless, you deserve to be" mantra. I thought they retired that at the end of the Reagan regime.


Ah, the old "They are merely victims of our capitalist society" mantra. I thought they retired that after the collapse of the USSR.

Oh wait.. it still lives within our Democrat Party.

[Parkbandit]

So what do you call liberal on liberal crime?

A good start.

[TheEschaton]

Someone living off begging and not paying taxes doesn't deserve to be a "free" American.

Funny, some (including Mssrs. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison) would consider freedom to be man's natural state of being, and something not to oppressed.

-TheE-

[Apathy]

Homelessness isn't a synonym for freedom; wtf is wrong with you?

[Bobmuhthol]

<<But if illegals can come up here and find something productive to do for compensation (albeit without paying taxes as well), what's stopping the beggars?>>

Why should they have to?

[Clove]

<<But if illegals can come up here and find something productive to do for compensation (albeit without paying taxes as well), what's stopping the beggars?>>

Why should they have to?

They don't, anymore than we should have to provide anything for them.

[Bobmuhthol]

I don't remember anyone crying about how they deserve welfare; the point was that not having possessions and subsequently not paying taxes shouldn't make someone any less of a "free" American.