"Maybe I shoulda waited a while…"

In an astounding display of bad luck timing, President Obama announced on March 31st that he would approve some offshore oil drilling along much of the East coast. 20 days later an oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico and suddenly, as someone in the government was quoted by NPR saying, "it is dead in the water." Like many sea turtles, fish and aquatic birds.
There are going to be lots of things dead in the water. Including the economies of many Gulf communities. That drilling idea is getting less popular.
House Repubican leader John Boener had said, on hearing Obama's announcement, that it didn't make any sense to not open the West coast to drilling also. I wonder if he has had anything to say about it lately?

In other news, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed a new law requiring police officers to check the citizen status of any person they think they have reason to think is an illegal alien. Reasonable suspicion. And if by chance, you get stopped and don't have papers on you, but can later prove you are a citizen, you still get 6 months in the pokey for being negligent and wasting police officers' time.
But it's not a racial profiling law, oh no. It's just coincidental that Arid-zona is adjacent to Mexico. The law's not just aimed at Hispanics. Why, all sorts of Russians and Serbs and Italians (a lot of Italians have sort of dark skins don't they?) will also be stopped and questioned, right? Riiiigghhht.

What is telling here, is that a lot of Arizona policemen don't like this law, primarily because they know that it is actually a racial profiling law, and that it would be a waste of their time, and pretty much destroy any community good-will they have developed.

I have a theory—it's crazy, I know, but then I've never claimed to be sane—that Anglos in Arizona are well aware of the fact that that territory used to be part of Mexico, and they are worried that if enough Mexicans migrate there and become citizens, they might vote to take the land of their forefathers back. Goodbye Anglos.

Nah, that's silly. But there is a lot of fear in operation in the Southwest, and it has not been helped by Federal inaction. The best the gov't. has done so far is put up a fence which basically does more to defile the landscape and interfere with wildlife migration than it does to stop illegal immigrant trafficking. Even poor George Bush tried to do something about immigration in a positive way, and got shot down by members of his own party. The people making the most noise about illegal immigration are the ones getting the most contributions from those who benefit by employing the cheap labor of the illegal immigrants.

And speaking of moronic Arizonan political behavior, I understand that John McCain has recently said that he is "not a maverick." Uh, John, wasn't that the crux of your presidential campaign? You don't use being a "maverick" as a political slogan, put it on the cover of your book, and then say, "oh, i didn't mean it."

Does Arizona get the politicians it deserves? It looks like Arizona may take over from South Carolina as this years political cynics' "gift that just keeps giving.'

I'm sure that since I have not been posting lately, that both my readers have been finding more useful things to do with their time. Right?
Likely not.