Tag: oakland
Sanctuary Cities Prepared To Welcome Migrants ‘Dumped’ By Trump

Sanctuary Cities Prepared To Welcome Migrants ‘Dumped’ By Trump

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Confirming Friday that his administration is considering sending undocumented immigrants en masse to sanctuary cities, President Donald Trump framed the proposal as a threat—but several politicians and rights advocates replied that immigrants would be welcome in those communities.

The president announced that the White House is weighing the proposal hours after the Washington Post reported that it had been considered and then rejected last year.

“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” Trump tweeted.
At least one sanctuary city mayor, Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, responded that he would happily welcome any number of immigrants sent to his city.

“The city would be prepared to welcome these immigrants just as we have embraced our immigrant communities for decades,” Kenney said in a statement. “This White House plan demonstrates the utter contempt that the Trump administration has for basic human dignity.”

Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland expressed pride in her city’s status as one that bars all city employees from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and condemned the president for focusing his immigration agenda on keeping immigrants out of the United States.

“I am proud to be the mayor of a sanctuary city,” Schaaf told CNN. “We believe sanctuary cities are safer cities. We embrace the diversity in Oakland and we do not think it’s appropriate for us to use local resources to do the government’s failed immigration work.”

Much of the response to the Post‘s earlier reporting centered around what an aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the White House’s “despicable” attempt to use human beings as pawns to demonize immigrants.

As Libby Watson noted at Splinter, much of the corporate media’s reporting on the plan followed the narrative laid out by the Trump administration—that sending undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities would be an “attack” on those cities and their Democratic leaders.

“A premise like ‘busing migrants to San Francisco will punish Nancy Pelosi’ is not self-explanatory,” Watson wrote. “I do not immediately understand the mechanism by which releasing a tired, huddled mass of immigrants in cities with massive populations—and cities where asylum approval rates are much higher—would punish their representatives.”

“The framing is left as ‘the presence of migrants in cities will be bad for those cities.’ And in the end, that just does Stephen Miller’s work for him,” she added, referring to Trump’s policy adviser who has pushed for hard-line, xenophobic immigration policies.

Julia Carrie Wong, a technology reporter for the Guardian, echoed Watson’s concerns.

“Let’s not concede that having refugees in our cities is something to be threatened by,” Wong tweeted.

After Trump announced the plan was again under consideration Friday, critics noted that sending immigrants to sanctuary cities would simply be using the cities and their laws as they were intended.

IMAGE: The skyline of Oakland, California, with the Bay Bridge in the background.
Protests Against Police Continue In Bay Area; Oakland Websites Hacked

Protests Against Police Continue In Bay Area; Oakland Websites Hacked

By Matt Hamilton, James Queally and Veronica Rocha, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

After four straight nights of anti-police protesters crowding San Francisco Bay Area streets — prompting authorities to fire rubber bullets at crowds and arrest 19 people late Tuesday alone — the hacker collective Anonymous on Wednesday apparently sought vengeance.

Several websites for the city of Oakland were knocked out in a likely cyberattack. By Wednesday night, the sites for the city and the Fire Department were operating, but the Police Department’s website remained disabled.

In a message posted on Anonymous’ main Twitter account, the group took responsibility by invoking military lingo for taking out an enemy combatant. “Tango down: oaklandpolice.com,” the message said.

Since grand juries in Missouri and New York decided not to indict white police officers in the killings of unarmed black men, crowds have gathered in cities across the nation, voicing anger and frustration over treatment of minorities by police.

Anonymous, the “hacktivist” network that once eavesdropped on an FBI conference call on cyberpirates and temporarily disabled the Justice Department’s website in retaliation for prosecuting the founders of Megaupload, has become one of many groups supporting protesters.

The group posted personal information of Missouri residents who published racist messages on social media following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man killed in Ferguson in August by Officer Darren Wilson.

An Oakland spokeswoman confirmed that problems with the websites first cropped up on Tuesday night, when protesters who began marching in Berkeley headed south into Oakland.

In Berkeley, hundreds have gathered nightly since Saturday, meeting at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus and marching through the city.

On Tuesday night, about 300 people reached Oakland City Hall, setting small dumpster fires along the way, the Oakland Police Department said.

Perhaps the night’s most confrontational moment took place just after 9 p.m.

A large group of demonstrators climbed onto the 24 Freeway at 40th Street, halting traffic for about half an hour. Demonstrators threw projectiles, incendiary devices and rocks at California Highway Patrol officers, the agency said. At one point, fireworks were launched toward a CHP helicopter.

“Our fear, and what we are trying to prevent, is someone getting seriously injured or killed by choosing to march onto the freeway,” Assistant CHP Chief Ernie Sanchez said in a statement.

Officers issued orders to disperse, but some protesters remained. The CHP fired rubber bullets to end the standoff. Some people on social media accused law enforcement of firing tear gas into the crowd.

By the end of Tuesday’s demonstrations, the CHP had arrested 13 people on suspicion of creating a public nuisance or battery on a peace officer. The Berkeley Police Department arrested six people.

More than 1,500 demonstrators gathered in Berkeley on Monday, shutting down both directions of Interstate 80. The CHP arrested more than 160 people.

As a preventive measure, officials have closed or rerouted transit routes. Bay Area Rapid Transit has temporarily closed its Downtown Berkeley Station, and on Tuesday briefly closed its MacArthur Station in Oakland.

Capitol Corridor, Amtrak’s Northern California rail line, suspended service to Emeryville, Berkeley and Oakland, and planned to use BART trains to relay riders around the closed stations.

The CHP has typically shut down freeway onramps around Berkeley in an effort to stop protesters from gaining access to the roadways.

Photo: Protesters yell outside of the Berkeley Police Department protesting police violence in Berkeley, Calif., on Monday, Dec. 8, 2014. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group/TNS)

Frank Jobe, Doctor Who Saved Pitchers’ Careers With Tommy John Surgery, Dies At 88

Frank Jobe, Doctor Who Saved Pitchers’ Careers With Tommy John Surgery, Dies At 88

By Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES—In the fall of 1974, Dodger pitcher Tommy John heard his arm snap like a guitar string after delivering a pitch. The torn ligament was the type of injury that commonly ended athletic careers, but John, then a 31-year-old star, pushed team doctors “to figure it out.”

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Frank Jobe made what many consider the most extraordinary medical advance in baseball history when he invented a transplant procedure that resurrected the pitcher’s arm.

Jobe borrowed the idea of transferring a tendon from one body part to another, which had been used in hand surgery and to reinforce the joints of polio patients but never to repair a joint that endures so much stress — the elbow of a major league pitcher.

He snipped a 6-inch tendon from the pitcher’s good arm and wove it like a figure eight through holes drilled in the elbow of the injured left arm to replace the ligament destroyed by overuse. It worked so well that Pete Rose, then a player with the Cincinnati Reds, quipped: “I know they had to give Tommy John a new arm. But did they have to give him (Sandy) Koufax’s?”

Jobe, 88, died Thursday in Santa Monica, the Dodgers announced. No cause was given.

“Many of us go into medicine thinking we are going to change the world, and it just doesn’t happen, certainly not to this magnitude,” Dr. Timothy Kremchek, the Cincinnati Reds’ medical director and one of the few doctors who perform the Tommy John procedure on major league pitchers, said in a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Over the next 30 years, Jobe saved hundreds of pitching careers by performing the surgery. He attributed its popularity in part to the increase in million-dollar salaries, which put pressure on team doctors to consider near-bionic solutions to keep such players in the game.

Dr. James Andrews, a Jobe protege widely credited with perfecting the Tommy John surgery, has repeatedly called Jobe a founding father of sports medicine who brought treatment for baseball players out of the Dark Ages.

“Jobe initiated all of the things that have made elbow injuries both commonly recognized and treatable,” Andrews, an orthopedic surgeon in Birmingham, Ala., told Investor’s Business Daily in 2002.

As of 2013, more than 1,000 Major League Baseball players — most of them pitchers — had undergone the Tommy John procedure, the popular term for ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction.

“The impact he’s had on the game can’t be measured,” Lewis Yocum, the longtime team physician for the Los Angeles Angels and Jobe’s colleague, said in 1999. Yocum died in 2013.

The Baseball Hall of Fame honored Jobe last summer for developing the “historic elbow procedure” that has helped extend so many major league careers.

“Baseball lost a great man and Tommy John lost a great friend,” John said in a statement Thursday night. “There are a lot of pitchers in baseball who should celebrate his life and what he did for the game of baseball.”

If the Tommy John procedure remains the Mona Lisa of sports surgeries, as Times sportswriter Chris Dufresne once declared, then Jobe’s landmark 1990 operation to rebuild the right shoulder of then-Dodger Orel Hershiser could be enshrined down the hall in the Louvre.

When Hershiser, a Cy Young Award winner who led the team to the World Series in 1988, needed surgery to repair cartilage damage and tighten the ligaments in his shoulder, Jobe proposed a revolutionary procedure that had been done on only about 30 people. None were major-league pitchers trying to throw 90 mph fastballs.

Until then, such an operation meant disturbing and damaging muscles, which made it almost impossible for a pitcher to come back. Jobe designed a less-invasive approach — instead of detaching the muscle to repair the joint, he split the muscle and made the repair. He used microscopic tools and newly invented anchors that secured the ligament to the bone, minimizing trauma.

Hershiser recuperated from the 45-minute operation in secrecy and allowed no photographs of his 13-month rehabilitation. After winning his first game post-surgery in 1991, he threw a party in honor of Jobe and gave him a trophy.

“He gave me back the thing I love,” said Hershiser, who went on to pitch 10 more seasons and in two more World Series with the Cleveland Indians.

The two medical breakthroughs “revolutionized baseball because they have kept players on the field,” Kremchek said.

Jobe, whose elegant hand strokes in the operating room have been compared to those of a symphony conductor, repeatedly said he would rather be remembered for the strides he made that kept athletes off the operating table.

In 1979, he established a biomechanics laboratory at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood and pioneered motion analysis on the act of throwing. Rotator cuffs, a series of muscles that control overhead shoulder motion that can be abused by pitching, were the subject of the first study.

“We developed a lab that would photograph at 500 frames a second,” Jobe said in 1989. “We put electrodes in the muscles of the rotator cuffs, and we also coordinated that with pictures so we would know which was active at which part of the pitch.”

Rotator cuff injuries became less common, Jobe said, because of knowledge gained in his laboratory. The lab conducts studies in sports other than baseball, including running, tennis and swimming, and develops exercise programs to prevent and rehabilitate injuries.

Frank Wilson Jobe, the son of a postman and farmer, was born July 16, 1925, in Greensboro, N.C., and grew up there. His high school baseball career did not presage his impact on the sport — he spent most of the time on the bench.

After graduation, Jobe joined the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in 1943 as a medical supply sergeant. Working with doctors who risked their lives on the front lines, he realized his calling.

“These guys would be operating in tents with bullets and shrapnel flying around,” Jobe told The Times in 1991. “These guys were my heroes.”

He vowed to treat any athlete who needed help, regardless of whether he ended up helping an opposing team, just as military doctors tended to the enemy.

“I consider myself a doctor for individuals, not teams,” Jobe said. “You don’t use medicine as a means of winning.”

Back home after the war, he attended junior college in Tennessee and what is now La Sierra University in Riverside. After earning his medical degree from Loma Linda University in 1956, Jobe spent three years in family practice so he could pay off school loans.

While working in the emergency room during his three-year residency at Los Angeles County General Hospital, he became interested in orthopedic medicine. He also hit it off with an orthopedic specialist, Dr. Robert Kerlan.

After completing his residency in 1964, Jobe offered to help Kerlan with his workload. They sealed their partnership with a handshake.

“We really had a wonderful relationship for 35 years,” Jobe said of Kerlan in 1998. “It was almost like a marriage; we were very, very close.”

There was no jealousy between them, “and you usually can’t say that about doctors,” Kerlan told the Sporting News in 1993, three years before his death at 74.

The Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic opened in Inglewood in 1965 and later moved to Westchester. The Dodgers were already a client since Kerlan had been named their team physician when they moved from Brooklyn in 1958. Eventually the Angels, Lakers, Kings, Ducks and other teams joined their roster.

Baseball got a preview of what Jobe could do when he removed bone chips from the elbow of Dodger pitcher Johnny Podres in 1964. Post-surgery, Podres pitched two more seasons.

When Jobe operated on John a decade later, the ulnar nerve, which provides strength in the hands and fingers, became irritated during surgery. Weeks after the operation John’s left arm dangled at his side, his numb hand curled into a claw.

A second operation kept secret from the public was performed three months after the first to shift the nerve to the back of the arm and allow the tendon to learn to become a ligament.

John said Jobe gave him a “1 in 100” chance of pitching again.

“That was a wild guess,” Jobe said in 1989. “I didn’t have any idea what the chances were.”

The ever-modest Jobe admitted “it was probably the one thing in my career that stands out” but gave “the intelligent, cooperative” John credit for taking his 18-month rehabilitation seriously.

John had 288 pitching victories in his 26-year career, and more than half — 164 — came after the surgery. He went on to play for the Angels, the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees.

Jobe resisted his own fame, refusing to sign an autograph for the son of a star athlete because he thought the request ridiculous.

Jobe, a resident of Brentwood, is survived by his wife of 54 years, the former Beverly Anderson; their sons Christopher (an orthopedic surgeon), Meredith, Cameron and Blair; and eight grandchildren.

Photo: cathyt via Flickr