Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Closing the borders… sort of…

Anyone who fails to see the utter uselessness of this proposal, given the current state of illegal immigration, needs to check their heads.

Americans traveling to Canada and Mexico would need passports to come home to the United States under guidelines proposed Tuesday in the latest effort to deter terrorists from entering the country.

The new rules, which would be phased in by 2008, apply to Americans traveling from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, the Caribbean and Panama. They also apply to citizens from those countries who want to enter the United States — prompting Canadian officials to announce that they might reciprocate.

The regulations mark a dramatic shift from a policy that allows Americans to return home from neighboring countries without a passport. They also raise the potential of hampering tourism and commercial traffic with the United States’ two immediate neighbors.

An estimated 60 million Americans — about 20 percent of the national population — have passports.

Ask any CBP agent, and they’ll tell you that if they were allowed to have larger teams, less political intervention, and the ability to do their job correctly, the massive influx of illegal immigrants wouldn’t be a problem. They could literally shut it down in no time at all. Drafting legislation to make people flash a form of identification that is even easier to fake than a California ID card or drivers license make absolutely no sense, and sure seems to me like a great way to stall for time. Close to three years, to be exact.

Round the Reader Tuesday

In today’s Round the Reader, we have quite a bit showing the Decline of Western Civilization…

Over at Lee’s site, he has teachers being told to quit using red ink to mark errors on school papers, because ”it makes the kids feel bad”, and a school football coach (who used to put the players who slacked off into pink jerseys) being told to not do so anymore because it might offend breast cancer victims. I think I’m going to demand that they change traffic lights to a more pleasing blue, because red just pisses me off.

And from this many times removed story come a great point that should piss off anyone who hasn’t quite realized how dangerous this border situation is:

In 2004, the equivilent of 160 12,500 military divisions simply walked northward across the U.S.-Mexican border to disappear into our country’s interior. Opposing them is an apathetic federal government, a complicit media, an overworked Border Patrol, and now, the militia the Constitution intended.

To that, I would make one correction: “...and now, the militia the Constitution intended and that President Bush called ‘vigilantes’.”

Along those lines, Scott gives us Minuteman update.

On the lighter side of things (although I should probably not use that word when talking about Michael Moore, Junior), Jeff Goldstein throws down the gauntlet to Dem blogwhore Oliver Willis, and Ollie has finally managed to buy that steamer trunk on E-Bay to use as his lunch box for the show accepted.

OTB has a report on how every living President who served during JP2’s Prelature (Bush Sr., Clinton, and Dubya) will be attending the Papal funeral. (I would definitely not want to be in charge of security, with at least 200 world leaders showing up. I’d be happy to volunteer for counter-sniper duty, though.)

Mean Mr. Mustard shows us why a little censorship isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Finally, McGehee tells us about the newest Iraqi TV show, Hammurabi’s Most Wanted (it’s actually called “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice”), and well worth knowing about, because it counts as evidence against those idjits on the Left who Just. Don’t. Get. It.

Go forth, and peruse. I’ll expect a 500-word essay on at least two of them by Friday. (And that doesn’t mean writing “You suck!” 250 times, Mr. Moore. Don’t make me write another letter....)

An impressive read

John Hawkins borrows an incredible post from Jane Galt, and I’m not going to say anything but Read The Whole Thing.

She just got added to my RSS feed, my BlogRoll, and my personal daily reads.