Citizens of Upper Darby Township

Councilman Silva just called Bill Santora an ASSHOLE IN A Public Hearing.

UPPER DARBY RESIDENTS There will be no recycle calendar this year. I reached out to the township and was told: Information will be mailed out to residents pe...riodically with trash & recycling information, but it will not be in calendar form this year I followed up asking why but the person I was dealing with did not know the reason. Thank you Jeanne Kelly Halligan for tracking this information down, but like I asked on your post, So none of these geniuses know how to make a virtual calendar? I’ve got kids that can have it done in under a week Phase 1 of destroying a Township: Keep the information from the people. You’ve been warned again.

*** Medal of Honor Monday! *** During this week in 2011, a Medal of Honor recipient passes away. Barney F. Hajiro was the son of Japanese immigrants. He was ...also living in Hawaii Territory when Pearl Harbor was bombed. How many emotions did Japanese-Americans go through in those days? They knew their fellow citizens had become fearful of them. Yet it felt unfair. They were just as angry as everyone else was. I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor, Mr. Hajiro said during a 1999 interview. Why did they blame us? Finally, in 1943, a special Army unit was created. Japanese-Americans could serve in their own unit: the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The motto of that unit? Go for broke! The Nisei soldiers lived up to that name. Their unit would become one of America’s most decorated, given its size and length of service. Hajiro’s Medal was just one of these decorations. He placed his life on the linenot once, but three times. On October 19, 1944, Private Hajiro was in France acting as a sentry when he saw American troops under attack. He ran into danger, exposing himself to firebut he also took out two enemy snipers. Three days later, he and another soldier ambushed a group of 18 Germans! They killed two, wounded one, and took the rest prisoner. Yet Hajiro is best remembered for what came next. On October 24, the Germans trapped a Texas National Guard battalion in the Vosges Mountains. Multiple attempts were made to free the Lost Battalion. Finally, the Nisei were called in. It was basically a suicide mission. Three days later, nearly half the Nisei would be dead or woundedand the Lost Battalion was still trapped. Then, something happened in the 442nd, Army historians describe. By ones and twos, almost spontaneously and without orders, the men got to their feet and, with a kind of universal anger, moved toward the enemy position. Bitter hand-to-hand combat ensued as the Americans fought from one fortified position to the next. Finally, the enemy broke in disorder. One critical act was performed by Hajiro. His friend had just been shot and killed. Hajiro, one historian writes, could contain the torment of his soul no longer. With abandon he assaulted ‘suicide hill,’ yards ahead of the rest of his platoon, spewing the rounds his dead comrade had loaded in the BAR just moments earlier. His Medal citation credits him with taking out two enemy machine gun nests and killing two snipers. Soon the 442nd was in charge of Suicide Hill. Hajiro initially received a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions. It was later upgraded to a Medal of Honor after Congress ordered a review to ensure that veterans of Asian ancestry had not been discriminated against. Barney was a good man, Senator Daniel Inouye, another Nisei veteran, would tell reporters after Hajiro’s death. He didn’t go around blowing his own horn. He would just say he was doing something he was supposed to do. --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright 2013-2021 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory

WATCH: Outraged Leftists have a double standard when it comes to dangerous rhetoric...

Unity on whose terms

During this week in 1492, Christopher Columbus lands in the New World. Exactly 300 years later, New York City would hold the first Columbus Day celebration. Mor...e unofficial celebrations would follow, and the day finally became a federal holiday in the 1930s. Since then, the holiday has become controversialto say the least. Some people want to replace his holiday with an Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Others want to tear down Columbus statutes, labeling them a symbol of hate. But do you know how and why we started celebrating Columbus Day in the first place? It’s impossible to understand Columbus Day unless you first step into the shoes of our Founders. During America’s early years, the country was looking for heroes. We’d just cut ourselves off from England and had thus lost much of that heritage. Obviously, we had heroes such as George Washington, but Americans wanted other heroes, too. Christopher Columbus was a natural choice. The Italian explorer had risked everything to make a dangerous trip across the Atlantic. He had no idea that he would find an entirely new continent, of course. He was on a mission to find a quicker route from Europe to Asia. He never found Asia. Instead, he landed in the New World on October 12, 1492. He would make four voyages to the New World before his death in 1506. Perhaps it is unsurprising that Columbus came to be admired by so many after the American Revolution? His daring spirit, sense of adventure, and his willingness to put everything on the line were understandably appealing to a generation that had just foughtand wona war against the mighty British army and navy. Over time, Columbus grew into an American icon. His name is all around us, although you’ve probably never really thought about it. Columbia University is named for him, as is South Carolina’s capital. The Knights of Columbus adopted the name in remembrance of Columbus’s Catholic roots. Perhaps most notably, the District of ColumbiaWashington, D.C.bears his name. It’s worth noting that those in the Italian community became especially proud of Columbus over the years. They were immigrants who hadn’t always been treated well. But celebrations of Columbus became an opportunity, one historian writes, for reminding Americans of the indissoluble and everlasting bonds uniting American and Italian histories. Thus, to many people, the holiday took on a pro-immigrant meaning as well. Obviously, Columbus was far from perfect, and modern Americans will debate the pros and cons of remembering his legacy. But perhaps it would help the dialogue to remember just what it was that our ancestors admired about him in the first place. Ronald Reagan expressed this particular sentiment the best: [Columbus] was a dreamer, a man of vision and courage, a man filled with hope for the future and with the determination to cast off for the unknown and sail into uncharted seas for the joy of finding whatever was there. Put it all together and you might say that Columbus was the inventor of the American dream. Happy Columbus Day tomorrow! --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright 2013-2020 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory

Yard Politics War

Once a Marine, always a Marine. There’s no changing. And that’s why I wear this uniform today because I love it, said Osteen. I love my country. And if I had to go back in today, I’d go back in today. But I’m too old.

On this day in 1944, USS Frank E. Evans is launched. The destroyer’s service would tragically come to an end during the Vietnam War when she accidentally collid...ed with the Australian carrier HMAS Melbourne. Seventy-four sailors were killed that day, but they were never added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. But why? As it turns out, the collision occurred just outside the Department of Defense’s designated combat zone. Some people today are working to get the Lost 74 added to the Vietnam memorial, arguing that a mere technicality should not be used to exclude these sailors. So what happened? And why is there a controversy? Frank E. Evans had arrived in Vietnam in May 1969, where it participated in the war effort for about a month before leaving to retrieve more supplies. During this resupply trip, the destroyer was asked to take part in a training exercise in the South China Sea. But wasn’t Evans officially slated to return to Vietnam after the training exercise? Much of the dispute about the memorial seems to center on the answer to that question. Certainly everyone expected that Evans would return. The destroyer had merely been restocking supplies when it got sidetracked by the training exercise. Either way, trouble hit during the early morning hours of June 3, 1969. Evans was engaged in anti-submarine training exercises with HMAS Melbourne. At 3:00 a.m., the captain of Melbourne ordered Evans to move into a plane guard station. The captain of Evans was not on deck when the order was given. He was asleep! He’d left two inexperienced officers in charge with instructions to wake him if there was a change in formation. If only they had done so. Instead, those officers were apparently confused about where Melbourne was and what they were supposed to do. They should have turned to port and circled back to take up their position. Instead, they turned to starboard, putting themselves in Melbourne’s path. Things played out badly from there. The two ships collided, and Evans was sliced in half. The impact was so rough that it threw one of Evans’s lookouts off the American ship and onto the flight deck of the Australian carrier. Evans’s bow sank in less than 3 minutes, killing most sailors aboard that section of the boat. In the meantime, the Australian crew was working to save the remaining Americans. It was all very quick, Australian Captain John Stevenson would recall, very chaotic, but organized as far as the Melbourne was concerned. They all knew what they were doing. The stern half of the Evans was secured to the ship, and people hopped over the edge to help survivors back onto Melbourne. It was an incredible sight to behold, one eyewitness would agree. The back half of the destroyer was being tied to the starboard side aft of the Melbourne . . . . It was hard to believe what I was witnessing. Half a ship . . . gone! The Melbourne crew pulled American sailors from the water or transferred them from Evans. The search continued for 15 hours, but only 199 survivors were ultimately found. Seventy-four Americans had been killed, including three brothers from Nebraska who had asked to serve together, all aboard the same ship. After surviving an epic sea battle in 1945 off Okinawa, in which she had repulsed 150 kamikaze planes, shooting down 50, one historian concludes, the Evans ignobly went to her death through poor navigation. Adding insult to injury, the names of those lost still have not been added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright 2013-2020 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory

As has become my habit during presidential election years, I am running a series about the Electoral College: What myths persist about the system and what is th...e reality? Last week, I addressed the myth that "only swing states matter." Here is Myth #2: Myth: The Founders created the Electoral College because they did not trust the people to pick the President. Fact: The Founders knew that the voice of the people must be reflected in any government if it is to be legitimate. At the Constitutional Convention, George Mason, delegate from Virginia, expressed this sentiment when he declared that the genius of the people must be consulted. There are two angles to consider when discussing this issue. First, the Founders did distrust human nature, but this distrust has been misinterpreted. The Founders were students of historyand realists about human nature. They knew that humans are fallible and that power corrupts. They also knew that ambition, selfishness, and greed are constant dangers. All power in human hands is liable to be abused, James Madison would later observe. Unfortunately, the Founders' pragmatism about human nature has been twisted into a claim that they were simply elitists who didn’t trust the people. The allegation misunderstands the point: The Founders didn’t trust ANYONE. They might not have completely trusted the people, but they didn’t trust elected officials, either. Likewise, they didn't completely trust the states or the national government. When push came to shove, they didn't even trust themselves. Think about that for a minute. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention sat and discussed checks and balances on elected offices they expected to inhabit. These powerful men gathered in Independence Hall, the most likely candidates for the Senate and the presidency, continued to fear themselves, historian Carol Berkin concludes. Second, consider that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were faced with a very difficult task. Remember: They'd just fought a Revolution because they had no representation in the British Parliament. They’d laid their lives on the line for important principles of democracy and self-governance. They weren't likely to give up on that so soon. But they also remembered something that we tend to forget: Even if the American colonies had been given representation in Parliament, as they'd wanted, it would not have been enough. Americans still would have been a minority, outvoted time and time again by the majority of citizens at home in England. Americans still would have been tyrannized. Thus. the question that faced the delegates to the Constitutional Convention was a difficult one: How could they preserve important principles of self-governance, even as they protect minority groups from the tyranny of the majority? It's been said that simple democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. The Founders had to figure out how to create a self-governing society that would never let the sheep end up on the dinner plate. The Founders' solution was to blend the best elements of many forms of government into their new Constitution. Thus, American government contains some democratic elements (self-governance), but it also contains elements of republicanism (deliberation and compromise) and federalism (states are able to act on their own behalves). Other checks and balances give minorities tools with which to protect themselves from tyrannical majorities. For instance, we have presidential vetoes. We have supermajority requirements to amend the Constitution. We have a Senate (one state, one vote representation), as opposed to the House (one person, one vote representation). The Electoral College is simply another of these protective devices. The delegates to the Convention felt that they had created a presidential election system that would allow reasonable majorities to rule, even as it protected political minorities from tyranny. It is for this reason that Madison declared, He [the President] is now to be elected by the people. Another delegate, Alexander Hamilton, agreed that the new election system would allow the sense of the people to operate in the choice of the [President]. The Founders did not trust the people makes a snazzy sound bite. But the history of the Constitution and its Electoral College shows a much more nuanced picture.

John DeBerry's Moving Speech! "God Bless!" Hats: http://DreamRare.com

WATCH: What happened to the Drexeline Town Center project? After years of hard work from @Mayor Tom Micozzie, investors were ready to develop Drexeline into a f...irst-class town center, creating hundreds of jobs and millions in revenue for Upper Darby Township & our schools. Then came a politically motivated lawsuit from 3 Upper Darby Democratic committeepeople. This is the story. #SaveDrexeline

No Trash Pick Up if you’re on the Wednesday Routes!