Another Day In Our Fair City

Yesterday was election day here in our fair city and about three-quarters of the registered voters didn't care. At least I assume they didn't care because only twenty-six percent showed up to vote. I voted because they sent me a ballot in the mail. If I had to actually put on my shoes and find my polling place, I might have skipped it too. When you think about it, the number of disinterested citizens is much higher, since not all of them even register to vote. A lot of people find this troubling, but I figure if you are too lazy to even register, then I don't want you voting anyway. We elected a bunch of Democrats to the City Council. Our Council is now all Democrats, and yet we have a Republican Mayor. This doesn't matter that much since our City Council doesn't really accomplish much. The City is actually run by our City Manager. The Council mostly sits around moaning about downtown redevelopment, which has been stalled by governmental bungling for years now. At the end of the day, we could elect seven mannequins to the Council and it wouldn't matter much. The only thing they seem to get done is to hand out free rent to people who promise to bring life back to downtown. It never works out. Our big issue this election, was some crazy initiative that a well-known local crackpot got on the ballot to prohibit a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. It was so complex that it scared the bejeezus out of everyone who wasn't insane, and it went down to a flaming defeat. One thing the initiative would have done was to repeal a fee we pay to have the City pick up our trash. Yes, that's right, in addition to paying sales taxes and property taxes to the City, we pay them a monthly fee to pick up the garbage. Two of our Council members were elected in the last election on the promise to repeal this fee. Now they both think repealing it would be the end of life as we know it. We tend to elect people who are unashamed hypocrites. We also had quite an immigration dust up here in our fair city. As always, it pit the civil libertarians and immigrant rights folks against the throw the bums out crowd. Illegal immigration is a very contentious subject in these parts. According to the authorities, a kid at one of our high schools was observed to be acting high and I don't mean he was performing Hamlet from the roof of the school gym. This observation was later bolstered by the discovery of a small amount of pot on his person. The kid also happened to be an illegal immigrant, who along with his parents and siblings, has been living in the United States for six years. As our state law requires, school authorities called the local police because it is a crime to have drugs on school property. They also called the boy's parents, who hurried right down to the school, as you would expect concerned parents to do. School authorities later explained to the press that they had no choice but to call the cops and what happened afterward is not their fault. For reasons that I don't understand, somewhere in the course of their investigation, the police demanded to see the parent's drivers licenses. Of course, they don't have drivers licenses since they have been laying low for the last six years. Under expert police interrogation, they cracked and admitted that they are in this country illegally. So the cops called in the Border Patrol. A police spokesman later explained to the press that they had no choice but to call the Border Patrol and what happened afterward is not their fault. The Border Patrol rounded up the entire family. Mom and the children, including another child, in another school were taken to the Mexican border and escorted out of the country. Dad was held for a deportation hearing because he has been tossed out of the country on other occasions. A spokesman for the Border Patrol later explained to the press that they had no choice but to roundup the family since the cops called them and what happened afterward, while unfortunate, is not their fault. This is very troubling for a couple of reasons. Number one, I disagree with the notion that I or anyone else should have to provide identification to the police simply because they ask for it. In fact, without probable cause they can't. These parents should not have had to present identification simply because their kid got busted for pot at school. Secondly, it doesn't seem like a good idea for the Border Patrol to be able to go into a school to apprehend illegal aliens. There are better ways to go about this, if you must. This was more or less a public relations debacle for the local police and school officials. So, first thing this morning the local cops announced that they are not going to call the Border Patrol anymore to come to schools or churches to apprehend suspected illegals. The school district says that they will bar the Border Patrol from their campuses. You know, I get that we have to control immigration, but it is already out of control and no one in our very inefficient government has the smarts or the stomach to fix it. Tossing out one family doesn't solve our immigration problems, it just screws up their lives. Our local morning paper had an online poll asking people if the Border Patrol should be able to come into schools and churches to find illegals. Eighty-three percent of people said yes. I guess when I can disagree with eighty-three percent of folks, I am on solid ground. Lastly, a student at the school was quoted in the paper this morning and I was stuck by his quote. "I still think the Police Department shouldn't be allowed to ask someone about their citizenship," xxxxxx said. "That's not their job. Their job is to keep us safe and ensure our rights." If this kid is waiting for the police to ensue his rights he has a long wait coming, as my mother used to say. He will soon learn that our rights as citizens depend on our efforts to keep the authorities from taking them from us. On a different subject, I went out to play golf this morning. I suck at golf, I don't know what else to say. I thought I was getting better, but it seems I was wrong. I think I'm depressed. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky