Outage! Oh, and the Idiot of the Week Award!

Best to announce these before they happen, I suppose. Oh well – most everyone who reads this already knows what I’ve been up to. To those who don’t: I’ve been moving for the last two weeks and have had zero time to update. But now that hassle is done, and we’re coming back hard and fast.

Anyway, onto this week’s shining examples of human compitence:

Joker Busted!

JULY 28–Meet Spencer Taylor. The Michigan man, 20, was arrested early yesterday morning for allegedly trying to steal Batman posters and other collectibles from a theater showing “The Dark Knight.” As can be seen in the below mug shot, Taylor went to the Three Rivers Cinema multiplex in costume as the Joker. According to cops, he was charged with larceny and malicious destruction of property, and had to pose for booking photos in and out of character.

Not a whole lot to be said here. Mr. Taylor, your life’s ambition seems to be wanting to be a 2-bit thug following in the footsteps of a crazed psychopath. Enjoy your time in lockup – it’ll take more than a phone call to get out of there if they do it right.

The Real Argument on Illegal Immigration

Illegal immigration. The big hot-button we all saw back in 2006, and since. The subject that broke the camel’s back with the conservative base and McCain. There’s a lot of opinions on the subject: The right believes immigration as a concept to be a good thing, but illegal immigration undermines our institutions and disrespects our laws and our national sovereignty (especially when other governments promote it). The businessmen see it as a source of cheap labor, not only in terms of wages but in the extreme unlikelihood of lawsuits resulting from labor malpractice. The left see the importation of other nation’s impoverished as a humanitarian cause, and focus less on the legal aspect, but rather on the notion that we should improve these people’s lives. The “no borders” crowd needs to stop smoking crack. But that’s just the tipping point – opinions vary even more when you start going after specific subjects: how to deal with the people here, what rights as a non-citizen do they have, how should they be treated in terms of applications for citizenship, how to seal the border, etc. Just about the only thing we can seem to agree on is that the border needs to be sealed before the other problems are addressed. (Citing back to an AP/Newsweek poll showing 79% support for this back in ‘06 when the subject was hot)

But what’s really missing from the illegal immigration argument? No, it’s not the national security issues of the drug cartels on the southern border. No, it’s not the anchor babies stories, or the story of Raemon and Campos (sp), or other border agents who were silenced for what they did down on the border. No… the argument we should be having, the argument that should be the PRIMARY focus of this debate…well, it looks something like this: