We must add the name of Joycelyn Gardiner to the tragic list of Americans killed by drunk-driving illegal aliens. She died in Nashville when her car was struck early Saturday morning by an SUV driven by Victor Javier Benitez, who had two previous arrests resulting in four criminal charges. He should have been deported for these earlier crimes, but was allowed to stay and kill.

He was arrested in February 2006 on three counts of car burglary and two counts of attempted theft. Two months later he was convicted of one count of car burglary and sentenced by General Sessions Judge Casey Moreland to one year of supervised probation.

On Nov. 5, 2006, Benitez was rearrested on charges of public intoxication, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The following day he was convicted of all three charges and sentenced by General Sessions Judge William Higgins to seven days in jail.
[Police say TSU senior athlete killed by illegal immigrant driving drunk, Nashville City Paper 6/19/07]

A native of Port Arthur, Texas, Joycelyn was only 22 when her life was taken. She was about to graduate from Tennessee State University at the end of summer with a degree in criminal justice and planned on attending law school. She had been a competitive runner since the ninth grade and was a member of the TSU women’s track team. She was remembered as a track star back in Port Arthur:

Tom Halliburton, longtime sports writer at The [Port Arthur] News, was saddened to hear of Gardiner’s death.

“I remember when she started out in ninth grade at Lincoln. She really didn’t look like she’d have a chance at becoming anything in track and field. It was through her desire, dedication and hard work that she became a great track and field star,” he said. “She later went on to represent Lincoln at a state meet.”
[ PA woman killed in Tenn car wreck, Port Arthur News 6/19/07]

In small town America, a ninth-grade girl with a lot of grit is still noticed and is remembered years later. What a pity that Jocelyn’s promising future was ended before it began.

Nashville has had several shocking DUI deaths at the hands of illegal aliens in the last while, including Sean and Donna Wilson and Charlie Derrington. As a result, the city instituted a program in April of checking the immigration status on every foreign-born person arrested. But the increased vigilance was too late to nail Victor Benitez.

Randall Burns blogged about a video put up by the firm of Cohen & Grigsby, featuring a lawyer named Lawrence M. Lebowitz,[Send Him Mail] who said:

“And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And you know in a sense that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here. We are complying with the law fully, but ah, our objective is to get this person a green card, and get through the labor certification process. So certainly we are not going to try to find a place [at which to advertise the job] where the applicants are the most numerous. We’re going to try to find a place where we can comply with the law, and hoping, and likely, not to find qualified and interested worker applicants.”

They’ve pulled the Youtube Video, but the Programmer’s Guild has a version here:

If that one goes down, I’ll post the original as an AVI file.

Hugh Newton, who died last night after a short battle with bone marrow cancer, was a bluff, avuncular, ever-cheerful, much-loved Washington D.C. public relations executive who was part of the great generation of conservatives that came to power in the capital with the election of Ronald Reagan. But unlike many of that generation, he was always acutely aware of the new nation-breaking dangers posed by America’s post-1965 immigration disaster. He helped me with the bitter controversies surrounding the publication of Alien Nation in 1995 - at one point even arranging a lunch with Tony Snow, then a columnist, who spent the entire meal not meeting my eye and never wrote anything. Newton also tried very hard, along with his close friend and colleague Herb Berkowitz, to get the Heritage Foundation, with which they were both associated, to take a stand on the immigration issue. I hope it was a comfort to Newton in his last days that Heritage has just recently - after twelve years - begun speaking out. It was not Hugh’s fault that this may now be too late.

Let light perpetual shine upon him.

AP reports:

Only in the arcane world of the U.S. Senate could a quirky gambit known as a “clay pigeon” make the difference between passage of an important immigration measure and its death at the hands of opponents.

Democratic leaders hope the complex maneuver _ which makes use of the Senate’s labyrinthine rules to insist on votes on amendments _ will frustrate conservatives’ attempts to derail the embattled immigration bill, instead putting it on a fast track to passage next week.

In plain English, what this means is … well … Okay, I admit it, I am utterly baffled by what this means, other than that the Democratic leadership is amenable to playing Dr. Kevorkian to the GOP’s suicide attempt.