House of Eratosthenes

Via Boortz (you need to scroll down to “NOT SERIOUS ABOUT THE MEXICAN INVASION”, since as of right now his permalinks aren’t working for this). We get to find out how incredibly serious the feds are about illegal immigration.

A national backlash against illegal immigration has many police chiefs squirming behind their badges. They’re the faces of law enforcement in a country that doesn’t always enforce immigration laws. But Roswell Police Chief Edwin Williams has found an unlikely ally to help him feel true to his duty: the fax machine.

At least once a day his jailers fax the names of inmates suspected of being in the country illegally to immigration agents in Atlanta. It’s a practice Williams started a decade � and roughly 10,000 names � ago, long before illegal immigration grew into a front-burner issue.

Today, Roswell stands alone in the area covered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) regional office in Atlanta. No other jurisdiction in the Carolinas or Georgia sends such a list, said Kenneth Smith, the office’s special agent-in-charge.

The north Fulton city of 100,000 has faxed the booking sheets of 1,396 detainees to ICE in the past nine months alone, according to police department records. Immigration agents have picked up three of them, Williams said, or one out of every 465.

Don’t forget to check out the chart at the bottom of the article.

Okee dokee, I’m sure during an interview to explain this impressive lack of diligence, the feds are going to say something to the effect that this is the wrong approach, they’d follow up much better if Chief Williams followed the proper channels. Whatever. I’d just like to ask a hypothetical question about this.

What if the electorate took this much, much more seriously than whoever is on the receiving end of these faxes?

How would the electorate be behaving now, right before a midterm election? Suppose this issue was in the top-two or top-three on the minds of nearly all voters. What kind of a climate would we have…

…well. We’d have a decidedly anti-incumbent mood. We’d have a fever mildly expressing a bias toward the minority party, and suggesting that there will be a bloodletting in twelve days. But something that, at the same time, presents some resistence to being translated to a party preference. We’d have something just nodding toward the marginal possibility that Republicans might keep both houses…but if they do, boy howdee, they’d better watch their P’s and Q’s. Just a throw-the-bastards-out kind of thing. An “If you keep your seat it’s only because we decided the other guys are worse” kind of thing.

Both parties would be worried about their respective bases staying home. Democrats would be campaigning on “we are not the other guys,” they’d slam us all with eleventh-hour sex scandals and work overtime on agitating and mobilizing the grown-up hippies. Oh and of course, they’d vigorously oppose any attempt to verify ID at the polling place. Republicans would be campaigning on “don’t forget what the issues are,” and they’d tip-toe around the observation that they’ve been negligent in standing for things, promising to do better. They’d find new and creative ways of making this pledge without going on record agreeing that things are screwed up.

Rare, of course, would be the mainstream news story that would actually talk about this.

Right? Isn’t that what we’d have?

Well. What exactly would you say is going on right now?

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Passing Up TipsThursday, October 26th, 2006

Passing Up Tips
Thursday, October 26th, 2006