Hurricane Irene moves thru Washington DC….

From The Washington Post…. The leading edge of Hurricane Irene moved into the Washington region Saturday morning, several hours after the storm made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina just after dawn. Beginning with gusting winds and light showers, the brunt of the storm was expected to pass through the area overnight and into Sunday morning. It reached land as a Category 1 hurricane, downgraded a notch from the greater force it gathered over the open Atlantic. The National Hurricane Center reported at 2 p.m. that Irene’s maximum sustained winds were 85 mph. It is expected to grind north over the coastal states on a course that will take it through Maine and eastern Canada before the arctic chill forces its warm moisture to make a right turn into the Atlantic. After days of warning, it took no one by surprise. From North Carolina through Nova Scotia, people had raided markets and liquor stores for provisions, hammered plywood into place, stockpiled ice, flashlights and candles in case power is lost, and tied down everything that might blow away in tropical-force winds. By Saturday morning, Ocean City officials said the unprecedented evacuation of more than 200,000 residents and visitors from the barrier island had been completed with near total compliance. More than 2,000 of the area’s foreign student workers had been bused to Baltimore. The last holdout — a 7-Eleven near 120th Street — closed its temporary plywood doors at 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Light traffic continued to flow across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge early Saturday afternoon, but wind speeds were approaching 30 mph, the point when authorities said they would ban house trailers, motorcycles and other vehicles affected by strong winds. They said the bridge will be closed to all traffic if sustained winds reach 60 mph. In Virginia, nearly 200,000 people were subject to forced evacuations, and 65,000 residents have lost power, with Hampton, Norfolk and Virginia Beach bearing most of the hurricane’s impact….. More….

From Politicaldog101.Com….

10 years in the making…The World Trade Center reconstruction moves on…..

One World Trade Center is rising into the NYC sky….

The ‘pools’ outlining the footprint of the orignal buildings are working….

And the construction moves on…

Within the whole 11 acre site in lower Manhattan…

As this country does indeed….

Move on…

Michael Arad, designer of the Sept. 11 memorial in New York, pauses in front of the project in April. (Seth Wenig, Associated Press / April 7, 2011)

Michael Arad has taken on a lot of roles since 2004, when he beat out 5,200 others vying to design the memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the site of the fallen World Trade Center. He has been the architectural wunderkind emerging from obscurity to win the coveted job. He has been the stubborn outsider battling the powerful establishment to preserve his vision. He has been the crestfallen artist on the losing side of some of those squabbles. He has been the new father rejoicing in his growing family while immersed in the sorrow of those who lost their own loved ones 10 years ago.

Now, with the memorial nearly complete, he is the anonymous man in a hard hat, kneeling in the dirt, eyeing the lines, the lettering, the carefully carved corners and the rivulets of water, noticing tiny flaws that are invisible to most but infuriating to Arad.

“I’m the drill sergeant with the white glove,” Arad says with a laugh, trying to describe his latest role in advance of the formal unveiling of the memorial this Sept. 11. The creation, called “Reflecting Absence” and dominated by waterfalls flowing into the massive squares that once held the World Trade Center’s twin towers, opens to the public the following day.

Even as crowds begin strolling across the plaza to peer into the watery voids and to run their fingers over the names of victims carved into bronze parapets, construction cranes and heavy machinery will be grinding and hammering around them…..

More…..

From Politicaldog101.Com….

Latino’s…Like all the other immigrants that have come here…WILL change this place AND their children become Us…

This piece is something I have pointed out here at the Dog consistently in the past….

It reminds us the just as the African’s (who where SHIPPED here in chains), Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles and other came here…

Set up in their own neighborhoods….

Spoke their own languages….

Ate their own foods…

Brought their own cultures….

Latinos’s will are doing the same…

But the 2nd, and 3rd generations of these people’s will become just American as Apple Pie and Baseball….

I would ask…

Why are we afraid of this?

I would remind everyone as the author does…

This same question and the anti-immigration feelings out there have been around for centuries in these United States of America…

This linked piece below focuses on Pennsylvania…

It sheds a spotlight on the growth in that state…

Indeed…

The regeneration that sprung up in the old rust belt of the NorthEast…..

We must embrace this…

For it IS what this country is…

And…

Has ALWAYS been…..

A place that takes the ‘tired and poor’…

A learns to growth and prosper with those that come here to provide this place with new blood…..

“Three generations,” declares James Smith, an immigration researcher at the RAND Corporation. “By the time you get to the third generation, you can’t distinguish between Americans and Hispanic immigrants. That’s how long it takes to look like an American.”

A bit of context proves useful here. In its 235-year history, the United States cycled through two distinct waves of immigration, and now stands in the midst of a third. The first, from 1840 to 1889, gave us things like Christmas trees and St. Patrick’s Day parades. The second wave, which my aunt belonged to, ran from roughly 1890 to the start of the First World War. During that time, a whopping 3.7 million Italians, most of them poor, Catholic, and otherwise undesirable, washed up in East Coast ports. Huddled masses of Austria-Hungarians, Russians, and Poles followed in comparable numbers.

Because the population of the U.S. was markedly smaller at that time, each second- and third-wave immigrant had a proportionally larger impact on mainstream culture than each immigrant does today. At the height of the second wave, there were 8.8 incoming immigrants for every 1,000 Americans. Now the rate looks more like 4.6 per every 1,000.

The sudden influx of foreigners startled settled Americans, says Garrett Epps, a professor of constitutional law who has studied historical immigration. In the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, Americans felt the same sense of suspicion toward Irish, German, and Italian immigrants that some feel toward Hispanics today. All three groups deviated from what Huntington identifies as the core “American creed,” the set of values that defined traditional American culture. Among them: Christian religious commitment, individualism, and the “duty to try to create a heaven on earth,” carried over by the pilgrims and their black-smocked ilk.

If those values sound foreign or antiquated to us now, we have first- and second-wave immigrants to thank. They drank beer, practiced other religions, and started their own schools and newspapers, often to the aggravation of their American-born neighbors. “Immigration was very much on people’s minds in the late 19th century,” Epps says. “All of the concerns about immigration that we have now were also present then.”

A century later, those concerns look unfounded. From generation to generation, early immigrants achieved higher standards of living, educational attainment, and English-language proficiency. They moved to the suburbs; their children went to college. But it’s not as if these people vanished, dissolving into a population that pre-existed them. After all, you can eat souvlaki, spaghetti, or sushi virtually anywhere in the country…..

More….

Ain’t it true?

EVERYONE  here

Came from someone

From 

Somewhere ELSE?

From Politicaldog101…..