Snapped Shot

What can I say? They're doing the vanishing that Americans won't do:

Workers at a second county-owned golf course have abandoned their jobs after managers announced the county was auditing their immigration status.

The flight from Eisenhower Golf Course in Crownsville last week followed a similar scenario that unfolded at the other county-owned facility, Compass Pointe Golf Course in Pasadena.

"Some voluntarily saw fit not to return to their jobs the next day, and we haven't heard from them since," confirmed Rich Katz, senior vice president of Billy Casper Golf, the Northern Virginia company that manages both courses for the county.

Not to be a stickler here or anything, but I'd venture to suggest that warning an illegal immigrant of a pending immigration audit could be construed as "Aiding and Abetting" their illegality—Something which, last I checked, was still quite illegal.

It's not like tossing a bunch of country club managers in jail for a while would make much of a difference to your average Americans, is it?

Why bother with solving problems like tagging, when you can just keep making things worse?

The city of Los Angeles had good reason to push a tough anti-graffiti bill through the Legislature, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wasted no time in signing it. L.A. pushed the bill not only because taggers did their dirty work at more than 650,000 locations in the fiscal year that ended June 30, but they also were bragging about their work on Internet sites.

How's this for a statistic: In the year ended June 30, taggers defaced nearly 32 million square feet...

...

Critics of the new law contend that a tagger who paints over another gang's graffiti could be put in harm's way. Officials will have to figure out a way to prevent a possible death sentence for taggers, who are not the brightest of people, despite their artistic efforts. Taggers who display their work on the Internet, while divulging their handles, basically dare police to track them down. In that game of chicken, law enforcement has a real advantage.

Good to know that lawmakers in California are so concerned about the rights of lawbreakers.

(I've made sure to underline the key phrases in above sentence for those of you who might be unfamiliar with the concept of "governance.")

Of course, considering that 32 million square feet of tagging is a pretty good indication that California has lost all control of tagging, may I offer the most humble suggestion that maybe the solution isn't yet another muddle-headed law?

In the old days of long ago, when California was still "the" Wild West, there were cases in which crime raced out of control. You know how Californians back then handled things? Continue reading »

See if you can connect the dots in this article faster than the dunces at the Los Angeles Times:

Exotic illnesses afflict American poor
A study calls them the 'neglected infections of poverty.'
By Wendy Hansen, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 25, 2008

Despite plummeting mortality rates for most infectious diseases over the last century, a group of largely overlooked bacterial, viral and parasitic infections is still plaguing the nation's poor, according to a report released this week.

Many of the diseases are typically associated with tropical developing countries but are surprisingly common in poor regions of the United States, according to the analysis, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

You know, I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm willing to say with 100% confidence that, if it weren't for the totally unchecked illegal immigration from "tropical developing countries" we've been seeing over the past 20 years, "the nation's poor" would be totally free of these "surprisingly common" tropical diseases.

Good thing I don't get paid to be an "investigative" reporter. Can't have any of these actual questions being asked, can we?

(h/t Flavius)

Update: June 25th? Hmm.... I must've missed that article the first time around. Sorry 'bout that if you've already seen it!