The junior U.S. Senator from the great state of Texas, Ted Cruz, has been selected as this website’s 10th annual American of the Year, marking the first time that someone born outside of the country has been so honored.
Cruz was born in Canada, in the city of Calgary and province of Alberta in December of 1970 to a Cuban father and American mother from Delaware who were there to work the oil business.
Cruz’ parents moved to Houston, Texas in 1974, and he went to a Baptist high school, becoming Valedictorian of his 1988 graduating class. He then went to Princeton University, where he became a debate champion and noted speaker, graduating in 1992. He then attended Harvard Law School where he graduated magna cum laude, while also dealing with his parents divorce during this time.
In 1995, Cruz served in Virginia as law clerk to a true, great conservative jurist, J. Michael Luttig of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and in 1996 became the first Hispanic to clerk for the Chief Justice of the US when he worked for William Rehnquist.
After working a few years in private practice, Cruz joined the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 1999 as a domestic policy advisor, and was influential in the court process during the contested Florida election results battle at both the state and Supreme Court levels. This led to a role in the victorious Bush administration for a few years before a return to Texas.
During the Bush campaign, Cruz met his wife, Heidi Nelson, a New York investment banker who would go on to work for Condoleezza Rice at the White House and who now works for Goldman Sachs. They now have two daughters together.
From 2003 to 2008, Cruz served as Solicitor General of Texas, arguing numerous cases before the US Supreme Court including landmark victories in which he stood up for 2nd Amendment rights, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, and on behalf of a Ten Commandments monument at the Texas State Capitol.
Cruz returned to private practice from 2008 until his surprising Senatorial election battle of 2011. In what was described as a stunning grass-roots victory for fiscal conservatism, he defeated the sitting Lieutenant Governor and heir apparent. He then trounced his Democratic opponent in the November general election.
In the last few months, a poll by the respected Rasmussen organization found that Ted Cruz was the 3rd most influential world leader, following behind only President Barack Obama and Pope Francis. That position comes squarely from his emerging leadership as the most forceful, outspoken critic of what are proving to be disastrous liberal political programs, policies and ideas.
Particularly in 2013, Cruz emerged as a vocal opponent of Obamcare, the President’s attempt to socialize the American healthcare system. Cruz publicly and aggressively attacked the program at a time when many even within his own Republican Party were treading lightly.
What Ted Cruz has done is stand up and give voice to the massive base of the Republican Party that has felt left behind by the Party’s political leaders in recent years. As spending has exploded, war droned on, and deals been cut with Democrats that have allowed disastrous socialist programs to continue, that base has grown from restless to revolutionary.
While that Republican Party leadership cut those deals and smiled for the cameras, talking words like “compromise” and “collaboration”, the old “reaching across the aisle” stuff, Cruz not only recognized these continuing methods as disastrous for the Party politically, but for the nation intrinsically.
In 2013, Senator Cruz has invigorated the Republican Party base, which the Party will need if it is to have any chance at taking control of the full Senate in 2014 and then winning back the White House in 2016. Properly motivated, that base has the ability to make just those very things happen.
Republican control of both Houses of Congress, combined with control of the White House, in the next few years gives us the best, perhaps the only chance to reverse the disastrous liberal socialist spending programs instituted under Obama. That can only happen if more politicians become as publicly aggressive and fearless as Cruz was this year. Reaction to his style makes that possible now.
For his aggressive, principled, public stands on behalf of truly Conservative political values during a period when far too many Party leaders have been cow-towed into political cowardice, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is selected as the American of the Year.
NOTE:
In an original version of this article, I posited that Cruz was not eligible to become the President of the United States himself. This was based on an improper reading of materials which I believed stated that, with his having clearly been born outside of the U.S., both his parents needed to be U.S. citizens in order for him to be eligible for POTUS.
This is not so. On further research, the key information relating to Cruz comes from the ‘Citizenship Clause’ of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, as well as from the Nationality Act of 1940. Ted Cruz, with his mother clearly a U.S. citizen for more than 10 years, was considered a U.S. citizen himself at birth.
Basically, Cruz enjoyed ‘dual citizenship’ from the U.S and Canada. He has chosen to retain counsel in order to prepare the paperwork necessary in order to renounce his Canadian citizenship. This is clearly a precurssor to a projected run for the US Presidency in 2016 or sometime in the future. He does indeed enjoy such eligibility. My earlier comments were in error, and are well corrected here.
AMERICANS OF THE YEAR:
2004 – Pat Tillman
2005 – Bill O’Reilly
2006 – Rev. Billy Graham
2007 – P/O Chuck Cassidy (for the American police officer)
2008 – George W. Bush
2009 – Glenn Beck
2010 – Ron Paul
2011 – Seal Team 6
2012 – Michael Phelps
TO VIEW all articles relating to the previous ‘American of the Year‘ award honorees, simply click on that below ‘Tag’
There was no bigger development on the American political and social scene in 2010 than the emergence to power of the “Tea Party“, and that movement arguably had no bigger inspiration than Texas congressman Ron Paul.
Emerging in the wake of the disastrous Presidential election of 2008 that saw Barack Obama win the race to the Oval Office for the Democrats, the Tea Party (basing it’s moniker on the historical ‘Boston Tea Party’) espouses a firm adherence to the U.S. Constitution, drastic reductions in government spending, and reducing the national debt and budget deficit.
A longtime critic of what he perceives to be the frequent misuse of our nation’s military power by the American military-industrial complex, Paul inspired the Tea Party with his Libertarian-based run for the 2008 Republican Party nomination. Paul fell short, but his agressive criticisms of the American foreign, domestic, and monetary policies, especially in attacks on the Federal Reserve system, struck a chord with many.
For his leadership example and principled stand on the vital economic and Constitutional issues at this fragile time in American history, Ron Paul is named as this website’s annual “American of the Year”, following in the footsteps of previous honorees Glenn Beck (2009), George W. Bush (2008), Chuck Cassidy (2007), Billy Graham (2006), Bill O’Reilly (2005), and the first honoree Pat Tillman from 2004.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Paul went on to Gettysburg College and then to med school at Duke before becoming a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force during the 1960’s. On leaving the military, Paul became an obstetrician, deliving more than 4,000 babies in the ob-gyn field across two decades before turning solely to politics.
He first ran for President in the 1988 election as a member of the Libertarian Party, finishing 3rd in receiving .5% of the popular vote. More than trying to actually win, Paul wanted to begin to spread Libertarian values as an alternative to traditional Republican and Democratic Party platforms. Those values include strong emphasis on civil liberties, less government regulation, and military/diplomatic non-interventionism in a generally less powerful state.
In 1996, Paul sought a return to Congress, where he had held a seat from Texas during a portion of the 1970’s and 80’s, and won in a hard-fought campaign. After that he built his political popularity and power to the point where he was winning re-election fairly easily, now serving in the U.S. House of Representative from Texas’ 14th District.
Inspired by many of Paul’s ideals, the Tea Party candidates upset Republicans in a number of elections this year and became a viable political force with the elections of politicians such as U.S. Senators Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Mike Lee in Utah, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Dean Murray in the New York State Assembly, and Paul’s own son, Rand Paul, to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky.
While Ron Paul himself has had limited and perhaps just regional actual election success, his inspirational ideals and speeches have changed American politics and may have begun a genuine push-back by the more conservative side of American society in an age when liberalism and even socialism are rearing their ugly heads. For this inspiration and leadership, Ron Paul is the 2010 American of the Year.
NOTE:To view the write-ups for all of the ‘American of the Year’ winners simply click on to that ‘Tag’ below this article at http://www.mattveasey.com
Two small private schools that were little-known outside of the Dallas, Texas area were thrust into the spotlight last week. The Covenant School girls basketball team put a whuppin’ on the girls from Dallas Academy, a whuppin’ to the tune of 100-0.
You read that right, Covenant scored 100 points in a high school girls game. That might be worth talking about under some circumstances. Most girls basketball contests end with the winner scoring in the 40’s or 50’s. Scoring 100 points shows that you either have an outstanding club, or the other team was really bad (at least in comparison), or some other freakish thing occurred such as a multiple overtime game.
In this game, we can blame some of the above. Covenant is a Texas state-championship contender, Dallas Academy is not very good, and there was indeed something freakish afoot here. But that freakish event was not some multiple overtime thriller in which one team scored those 100 points and the other scored in the 90’s.
No, in this one, Dallas Academy scored zero points. None, nadda, zilch. They came up empty. They put up a donut. Nothing on the board, no balls through the hoop.
Think about how hard this 100-0 thing is to have happen. There are 48 playing minutes in a regulation girls high school basketball game. Each basket is worth two points. To score 100 points, Covenant was scoring at better than a basket per minute throughout the game. Meanwhile, Dallas Academy did absolutely nothing.
I overheard someone commenting on this game, that it would likely never happen in a boys game. Their reasoning was that at some point boys simply wouldn’t have taken it any more, and there would have been a physical penalty inflicted on the leading team by the losers that would have slowed down the pace, or ended the game.
Yep, he was talking about fighting. It isn’t right either, but his point was that at some point the losing boys team would have taken matters into their own hands and let the winners know that the embarrassment had gone too far.
At 10-0 you are off to a good start. At 20-0 you have taken complete control of the game. At 30-0 you have almost no chance to lose, especially at the high school level.
At that point, and arguably far earlier, you have shown that your talent level is no match for the other squad. You probably have already gone to your ‘bench’, meaning you have put in your backup or substitute-level players and they have continued the dominance.
At some point around this time, any further building of your lead has a simple phrase in the sporting world that describes what is happening: piling on.
This is where Micah Grimes got it all wrong. He is the Covenant girls basketball coach, and his response was that “it just happened.” Pardon me, Mr. Grimes, but something like a 100-0 sporting event between young girls can never ‘just happen’. Rather as the coach you allowed it to happen.
This was a teaching moment that someone in charge of our kids is supposed to take advantage of and use to better their lives. Long after the embarrassment of being on the winning side of a 100-0 game subsides, the lessons of a 50-0 victory could have been felt, perhaps for the rest of the lives of some of the girls involved. This was a moment to teach the virtue of charity, the generosity and helpfulness for the needy or suffering, the gift for a public benevolent purpose, the idea of benevolent good will.
Grimes was in control. He controlled what was said to the girls on the sidelines. He controlled their playing time, both in this game and in future games. He had the ability to put on the brakes.
What could he have done? He could have told his girls to walk the ball up the floor on every possession. He could have told them to play soft defense and allow the Dallas Academy girls to setup plays and take shots. He could have pulled a couple of his key on-court leaders aside and made sure that the girls stayed with this program on the floor.
There are ways to handle this type of situation without making it look like a joke or a Harlem Globetrotters game. The fact is that the result was already settled, all that remained at a certain point was to determine the final score, and to determine how this level of a blowout would be remembered.
Grimes should have taken this opportunity to speak to his girls about these very ideas of charity, generosity, good will, benevolence, and sportsmanship. He could have built his halftime speach around it. He could have reinforced it at every stoppage of play.
He easily could have made the girls understand that they were in a unique situation, one that they may never be in again in their playing careers. He could have let them know that this was a one night reduction in their playing level intensity. There was obviously no real competition available to them here.
He was wrong to say that it just happened. He allowed it to happen. In fact, he directed it to happen. He had his team keep up full pressure until the 100-0 mark had been achieved. From attendee accounts it was very obvious that the score was something that was seen as a goal as the game unfolded.
Afterwards, coach Grimes felt no guilt or shame. The school, on the other hand, got it right. They fired Grimes in the immediate aftermath, the same day as the game, and issued a public apology.
For his part, Grimes remained steadfast in disagreeing with the apology and saying that “Although a wide-margin victory is never evidence of compassion, my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy.”
He got the first part right about a lack of compassion. But his team lost it’s honor and integrity as they continued to effectively kick a person lying on the ground. How they showed any respect at all to Dallas Academy is beyond me.
This was not a professional game where players are paid and must accept the consequences of any game. This is a high school where athletics are supposed to be only one part of a learning process for the kids involved, from players and cheerleaders to spectators and even disinterested students.
Micah Grimes may have been just a coach at Covenant and not have had the official title of teacher, but he failed in that a big part of the job of every high school athletic coach is exactly that – teacher. He missed a huge opportunity to teach his girls, and his school, about charity.
For the resulting magnitude of that failure, Grimes deserved to lose his job, and no high school should consider hiring him until he admits his mistake, shows that he truly understands its ramifications. Grimes must apologize to all involved, and takes steps to prove that he is ready to move forward with an adjusted mindset.
There is never a need to sacrifice charity and compassion simply for winning a sporting event.
For the 2nd time in three years, the City of New Orleans prepares this morning to be blasted by a powerful hurricane.
The devastation wrought back in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina is now legendary, but a great deal of that horror was not a creation of God, or Mother Nature, or any kind of natural or supernatural being or event. The devastation was brought on man by man.
For at least decades, the governments, both local and regional, and the people of the Gulf region were warned that this was going to happen, it was just a matter of time.
It is not the responsibility of the federal government to build giant walls and roofs so that men can be protected from every possible disaster. Men need at some point to take responsibility for their own actions and lives.
When you purposefully and intentionally make the decision that you and your family are going to live in an area that is historically prone to certain natural events, then you have chosen to take on certain risks and have the responsibility to ensure that you and yours can survive and recover when those events occur.
And the key word in that entire statement is ‘when’, because this is not an ‘if’ scenario. Hurricanes barrel through the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico every single year. They have done so for all of recorded history, and they will continue to do so into the future.
In the U.S., this means that coastal states such as Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and the Carolinas are always going to be vulnerable to these types of events. Anyone who moves into or remains living in those states near the coastlines makes the choice that the beauty of everyday life there is worth the trade-off in having to evacuate or baton down when these strong storms hit.
When they do hit, those who have made those decisions, along with their local and state governments, should be responsible for any recovery and rebuilding.
It is not as if these events are a surprise, a sudden calamity that could not have been forecast. While any particular storm cannot be foreseen, the fact that there will be storms year after year, and that some of these will be of the devastating variety, means that people who live in these areas are rolling the dice.
When we gamble and win, it is considered being ‘lucky’, it is not usually considered smart. When you gamble and lose, it should not be my responsibility to bail you out and put you back on your feet.
Do people need help out of the goodness of others hearts? Sure, that is the point of charity and volunteerism. But for the federal government to continue to take hundreds of millions of dollars in hits because of the continued and repetitive gambling of some of our citizens is ridiculous.
Every time that a natural disaster hits, the first question is “What is the federal government going to do about this?” The fact is that members of local governments have made the choice to be citizens of those communities, and they need to be responsible. They need to educate their fellow community members, prepare for responding to these incidents, and prepare for recovery from these incidents.
The local governments and businesses and citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes were told that a Katrina-like event was going to happen. They chose to make other decisions over the years and decades in their spending that did not address the issues of basic protections against such a storm. Instead, the federal government was expected to protect them from their choice to live in that area, and bail them out in recovery when the event actually happened.
And this is not the only example of this type of thinking and lack of preparation. For decades, the people in the San Francisco and Oakland areas, and many other communities in southern California, have been warned that a major earthquake of a devastating magnitude is going to strike at some point. Not some point hundreds of years in the future, but likely at some point in the next few years or decades.
It is going to happen: buildings, bridges, roads, homes will topple and hundreds if not thousands or more of people are going to die. It is a fact of the future that every one of those people has been warned about. But they have chosen to live in those areas anyway because there are many benefits on a day-to-day basis.
I respect and acknowledge the right of those folks to live in those areas. But they have chosen to live there in a known disaster-waiting-to-happen neighborhood, and when it happens, likely in my lifetime, it should not be my responsibility to bail them out and help them rebuild right there so that it can all happen again someday.
Sudden, unexpected events are one thing. Predicted and expected events are another. One results in a tragedy, the other results in a bad choice coming home to roost.
It appears that Hurricane Gustav, which will slam into Louisiana today, will not be nearly as bad as Katrina was, but it will be a strong storm that will beat down an area already beaten badly. The fact is that a hard rain is going to fall, and the further fact is that it won’t be the last time.
For two hundred and thirty years now, the United States of America has been a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. As we have grown up as a nation, that reputation has only grown greater, has only become more solidified.
When people in other countries dream of a better life for them and their families, it is America to which their dreams turn.
There are no hordes of protesters marching in the streets of Moscow, Beijing, Paris, Tokyo or Mexico City hoping to ease their process of becoming citizens in Russia, China, France, Japan or Mexico.
As Neil Diamond famously sang: “They’re comin’ to America!”
For all the negative blather you hear about America from our own liberal press, the foreign press, and the many citizens of foreign nations interviewed on those broadcasts and in their articles, it is America to which they come to escape oppression and infuse hope into their lives.
In our past, we have been an immigration nation. We were born and nurtured through our earliest years as a nation as immigrants from England to a new set of colonies and then a new free country, on what is now the American east coast.
We grew and thrived, spreading across the land from east to west, thanks in large part to massive immigration from other European nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
We are an immigration nation at our very core. That is our heart and soul, the accumulated values and experiences of our individual forefathers and our families’ ethnic and racial heritage, combined with the melding into American customs, laws and values that have formed over the centuries.
As America has a heart and soul formed from its people, those many home-born and immigrant citizens, it also has a body. A very real and distinguishable body.
Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii, which pose their own individual circumstances, the recognized body of America is the contiguous forty-eight states, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and sharing a common border to the north with Canada and the south with Mexico.
For the better part of America’s life as a nation, we have done little of substance to control our intake of immigrants in number, little to ensure the continued quality of immigrants in maintaining basic assimilation qualifications, and little to control and secure those two massive borders.
The America of today has become fat and bloated due to laziness and a general lack of will power.
America has become the fat, balding, middle-aged man who wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, doesn’t like what he sees and says “Houston, we have a problem.”
Truth is, we have had this problem, or at least the root causes of the current problems, for the entirety of our existence. We have never properly organized American immigration policy, and we have never properly secured our borders. Not under Republican administration, or Democratic administrations. Not even under Whig administrations.
In times of war and in times of peace, in times of prosperity or times of despair. In all our combined national life, we have not addressed these issues, putting them off for another day.
That “another day” is upon us. The time to make real change is here, now. We are at a critical turning point in American history, and the decisions that we make in the next few months and years on the issues of border security and immigration reform will affect America’s very continued existence as a nation, certainly as an identifiable society.
There are many sides to the immigration issue. First, there are literally hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants living and working in the United States today. Right now, as I type out this article, right now as you read it. It is reality, and it is a massive number that has become uncontrollable. And the problem gets larger and worse for every day that we do nothing to change.
There are many sides to the border issue. Thousands stream across the border with Mexico every single day. Some are Mexican citizens, and citizens of other South American countries, coming to seek a better life for their family. Some are simply seeking to milk our system for handouts.
Some, frankly, are terrorists seeking an easy way into our country, and then plotting to attack us from the inside when the time is right. That is reality as well, and the problem gets larger and worse for every day that we do nothing to change.
My proposals are many, large-scale, and expensive. They require construction, security, manpower, enforcement, follow-up and most of all willpower. They would require full documentation of every single illegal currently in the country, full control and security of our borders, and the ability to easily track and follow-up on every non-citizen that enters those borders.
First, I propose that we undertake two programs simultaneously, addressing each particular issue. Quick planning and construction of a full 2,000 mile barrier along our southern border with Mexico, and the immediate amnesty to all illegals currently in the country combined with their documentation and adherence to new procedures.
Let’s start with the border, because the failure of any nation to properly secure its borders is simply bordering on the insane.
Plans are already available that are feasible. Educated folks who have lived with the border issues in California, Arizona and Texas have already been down this road. Perhaps the best is a proposal for a full wall in many places, enhanced with fencing, ditches, security cameras, increased numbers of border patrol agents, and unmanned surveillance vehicles.
This plan, or one like it, should be approved in the next few months, adopted as necessary by serious leaders of both parties, and then fully constructed within the next few years. This is a goal that can easily be met with a full government commitment. It already has the support of a large majority of American citizens.
While the American Southern Border Project is underway, every resource possible should be in place to support the security of the border and of the construction project itself. Large increases in border patrol agents, modernization of the equipment they use, public and spirited support for entities such as the volunteer Minuteman Project. We can do a great deal more as the Southern Border is being constructed than we are today.
With the border better secured, we are at the same time getting our illegal immigration situation under control. Let’s not kid ourselves, or allow the liberal press to deflect our sensibilities away from the reality that there are two words involved here. Not just the word immigration, but also the word “illegal”.
It is a fact, the United States of America has laws regarding immigration, and these people have purposely and willfully broken those laws.
It is also a fact that the massive arrest, or deportation, or some combination involving hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants is an impossible situation to enforce effectively. What is needed is a system of amnesty, combined with penalties and enforcement measures.
In my proposal, amnesty does not mean outright forgiveness, citizenship, and a hearty “welcome to America”. I propose that we set a time limit, possibly by the end of calendar year 2006 for example. By the end of this time, every single individual in this country who is not a citizen and is not here by some other legal immigration measure must register with an agency to establish their legalization status.
This proposal would mean either creation of an agency to handle this registration, or the expansion of existing immigration personnel and systems. Individuals who register, supply valid proof of their identities, and agree to fully conform with American law into the future would be granted temporary guest worker status, and could get into line for full American citizenship, if that is what they ultimately wish to accomplish.
Any individual who can not properly document their identity to the satisfaction of immigration authorities would be deported, as would, of course, any individual who did not wish to conform to American laws.
Any individual after the cutoff date who is found to be illegal would be deported. Any repeat violators into the future would be charged and imprisoned here in America.
In family situations, the law needs to be changed to reflect that individuals born here to at least one American citizen parent are considered citizens, but that individuals born into a situation where neither parent is a legal American citizen are not granted citizenship.
In family situations, if the parents cannot or will not fulfill the requirements of the new amnesty program, then the entire family will be deported.
The United States of America did not create the problems of the world, and did not create the problems of every individual family, whether citizen or illegal immigrant. The United States government, and thus its tax-paying citizens, cannot be expected to support the bad, improper, illegal or irresponsible decisions of individuals and families within its borders and around the world.
What America does need to do is establish to the best extent possible an example of responsibility, and to setup a framework under which the exercise of that responsible citizenship can be affected.
Into the future, America also needs to educate the business community that the hiring of illegal workers will not be tolerated, and will result in massive fines and penalties against offending employers. This can be accomplished through spot checks and audits by government agencies already in existence.
In 1986, during the conservative Reagan administration, the country passed immigration reform laws that included amnesty programs, as well as sanctions against businesses that continued to employ and support illegals.
These measures proved to be of no value, as business owners then accepted flimsy, incomplete or outright fraudulent paperwork from their employers as proof of citizenship status and identification. There must be simple guidelines this time around that are easy to follow for any business owner, accompanied by strict penalties for non-compliance.
The bottom line is that we must identify every individual currently in the country illegally, give them an opportunity to come clean and get with the program, give business an opportunity to come clean and get on the right track, and effect harsh measures against any individual or business who then disregards these controls into the future.
As we move forward, America needs to make some real changes in our educational system. We need to finally establish, once and for all, that English is the official language of the United States of America, and must see to it that it is effectively taught to every school child across the country. The learning of practical, effective English should be one of the requirements for every single applicant for American citizenship.
Also, we need to more effectively and aggressively teach American history, civics, and law in our public school classrooms. The cultural rainbow that has been taught over the past few decades is fine, on an elective basis, and as a general minor part of any curriculum. But the support through the educational system of a solid American culture, formed over the century’s right here on our shores, needs to be first and foremost.
The failure over our nation’s history to properly secure our borders and the failure to come up with a workable, sustainable immigration policy go hand-in-hand in undermining long-term American values and society. They also contribute to violations of our national security in a time of war, when any number of enemies of our way of life has directly threatened us with annihilation.
America needs to move immediately to fully secure our borders, to fully document every non-citizen, and to require those who wish to join our American family to do so in an orderly and legal fashion. Only in this way can we secure the very benefits that these illegals come to America to obtain: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
