Saturday, June 26, 2010

...or maybe there ain't no cure for the summertime blues?

... Things you missed because you were watching Uruguay play Cameroon.

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Arizona is continuing its war on all brown-skinned people. Apparently the plan is to keep anyone darker than the cast of Harry Potter from ever setting foot on the desert dump that is Arizona. I wonder who John McCain will get to clean his 47 houses...Mary friggin Poppins? It's not like illegal immigrants actually want to stay in The Grand Canyon State. They view Arizona as more of a porti-john on the way to Vegas.

Anyway two items attracted a bit of attention this week. State senator Russell Pearce, author of sb1070, the law that makes being Mexican-looking a crime in Arizona, is contemplating a new abomination. Untroubled by annoying documents like the Constitution, Sen. Pearce intends to propose a bill that would nullify the so-called "anchor baby amendment" certifying that children born in the United States are citizens even if their parents are illegal. This racist turdblossom is confident that the Fourteenth Amendment poses no real impediment. Given the current make-up of the Supreme Court he may be right.

Why not stop all the niceties and just declare open season on all brown-skinned people? Sure, you might kill an occasional priest or policeman but hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. After all, every knuckle-dragger in the state is already authorized to carry concealed. What's a gun for?

With an eye toward ensuring that the citizens of Arizona are as racially polarized as possible, Gov. Jan Brewer (Republican from Rhodesia) was quoted Friday as asserting that most of the immigrants crossing the border from Mexico are in fact mules for the drug cartels. "I believe today, under the current circumstances that we are facing, that the majority of illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in." It's difficult to decide which is more egregious: the blatant racist rhetoric offered without one shred of proof or ending your sentence with a preposition.

America needs to vote with their feet. No one should vacation in Arizona. The Baseball All-Star Game scheduled for 2011 in Phoenix should be moved. Taco Bell should close every franchise in the state. The only food products eligible for import into Arizona should be herring and brussel sprouts. If you're so anxious to have your population look like Denmark's you should learn to eat like them.

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This week's winner of the Claude Rains/Captain Renault Award ("I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here") is Judge Martin L.C. Feldman. You may have run across Judge Feldman's name in connection with the ruling on whether the Obama administration can impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling. The President/Dept of Interior/Minerals Management Service had the daffy notion that the biggest oil disaster in history should cause a pause in deepwater drilling at least until we find out the cause. Judge Feldman begged to differ. Having ruled in favor of big oil (big surprise) we have since learned that: the Judge is a BFF of Supreme Court powerhouse Antonin Scalia (bigger surprise) and (biggest surprise) that he owned stock in ExxonMobil which he only sold the day before his ruling.

While we know the rules of law and the Cannon of Ethics have yet to be translated into a language Louisiana folk can understand (Feldman was born in Missouri but "educated" in New Orleans), it might have been presumed that a judge hearing an oil related case would recuse himself owing to a potential conflict. Such a presumption would show a woeful lack of knowledge of Bayou justice. In the great tradition of Huey Long and Edwin Edwards we are fortunate that Judge Feldman didn't Twitter his friends and family and give them a heads-up on the impending ruling. It's comforting to know that oily pelicans aren't the only slimy things to wash up on the beaches of Louisiana.

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