Police Chiefs: Overhaul Immigration Policy

Chief John Timoney of Miami


Seeking to inject their views into the revived debate over immigration overhaul, several big-city police chiefs urged Congress on Wednesday to draft a new policy that improves public safety by bringing illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

Sensible.

The chiefs — updating recommendations made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments — called for an overhaul that would integrate immigrants into the legal system, possibly with driver’s licenses, and separate the local police from immigration enforcement.
Have the federal government accept responsibility for a national policy?

Chief Timoney, Chief Art Acevedo of the Austin Police Department in Texas and former Chief Art Venegas of the Sacramento Police Department said local law enforcement had been undermined by the blurred line between crimes and violations of immigration law, which are civil.
Congress has avoided dealing with the issue, and by doing so they have shifted the burden to local law enforcement, including the costs.
Those who call illegal immigrants “criminals,” they said at a news conference here, are misreading the law and hurting their own communities by scaring neighbors who could identify criminals. “When you remove the emotion from the debate,” Chief Acevedo said, "no one can argue that it is in the best interest of public safety to keep these people living in the shadows.”

Emotion is what mucks everything up.

They said they favored tough border enforcement and efforts to prosecute employers who rely on illegal foreign-born workers. But they insisted that local law enforcement be kept apart from immigration enforcement because such agencies lacked the training and time, especially with recent budget cuts.

Another efect of the economic slowdown.

Jessica M. Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration enforcement, said the chiefs were misguided.

The motto of the organization? Pro-immigrant, low-immigration think-tank which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.

The costs for local police are often minimal, Ms. Vaughan said, because the federal government pays jailing costs, and verifying immigration status can be done in conjunction with standard checks of criminal databases. Immigrants are less likely to report crimes, she added, because of language barriers, a lack of understanding about American law, and a general distrust of authority stemming from corruption in their home countries.

So the police don't understand what is really happening, but a think-tank analyst does. O, sure.

“None of this is related to fear of deportation,” she said.

Huh? It is corruption of law enforcemet in their home countries that afflicts immigrants

When Life Is Just a Bowl of Freebies

No one knows who will win Thursday night's Bowl Championship Series National Championship game between Florida and Oklahoma. But one thing's for sure: Players on both teams will walk away with some pretty nice swag. That's because the bowls now give out gift bags just like the Oscars. It's one of the few times of the year when college athletes are allowed to accept gifts. And this year, Miami, host to the Orange Bowl and the BCS title game, was the place to be. Players in both bowl games were allowed to stroll through the Sony Suite, an exclusive room at their hotel stocked with Sony Electronics products. Each player had a $300 credit limit. Players picked out the items they wanted, including PlayStations and flat-screen TVs, and Sony shipped them wherever they wanted. Participating schools also typically order extra gift bags for big-donor alumni and other VIPs they bring to the games.

It is self-evident that what matters is money.

Gift bags are just one example of how these bowl games, originally designed to promote tourism, have become multimillion-dollar enterprises in their own right. Revenues for the 34 postseason bowl games range from just over $1 million for the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl to more than $30 million for each of the five BCS games. College bowl games are an estimated $400 million-a-year industry, and more than 20 of the bowl games have tax-exempt status.

According to a survey last year by Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal, the Chick-fil-A Bowl is the most profitable. This year marked its 12th-straight sell out, generating a roughly $2 million profit on about $12 million in revenue and $10 million in expenses. Revenue has risen more than 70% over the past decade, a marked improvement from the 1990s when the bowl actually lost money. Bowl executives don't do badly either, with most getting six-figure salaries. Based on 2006 tax returns, the Sugar Bowl's Paul Hoolahan makes more than $450,000 a year, the Outback Bowl's Jim McVay nearly $500,000, and Fiesta and Insight Bowl Director John Junker more than $400,000.

Money for everyone, schools included. But, what is the cost?

And while everyone's fretting over the bailout package for the auto industry, most taxpayers would be shocked to learn that they're also footing the bill for some of these highly profitable bowl games. From 2001 to 2005, seven tax-exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid. The Sugar Bowl, which in one four-year period got $4.1 million in funding from the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, pays a consultant more than $10,000 a year to "monitor legislative developments . . . related to the continued financial support of the Sugar Bowl." From 2001 to 2005, 38% of the Brut Sun Bowl's total revenue, or about $9 million, came from receipts from a Texas rental-car tax that are diverted into the bowl's bank account.

Yes, the bowls are tax-exempt. Why? Back scratching; also called corruption. But that is not the only cost.

In short, the college bowl games generate some pretty impressive numbers. But Derrick Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe, comes up with his own numbers each year: The bowl teams' graduation rates.

"Florida has a 68 percent graduation rate but a 25-percentage-point racial disparity," he wrote in his Dec. 13, 2008, column. "Oklahoma should flat-out be disqualified with a 46 percent graduation rate."

Less than half graduate.

Mr. Jackson also found that four other schools that played in BCS bowl games – Ohio State, Texas, Alabama and Utah – all have black graduation rates under 50% and an average racial gap of 30 percentage points.


Watching the Oklahoma-Florida, game, I saw that Florida's top receiver is majoring in Sports recreational management. O, yes, indeed.

DEPARTMENT OF TOURISM, RECREATION AND SPORT MANAGEMENT
COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN PERFORMANCE
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

That is from a course syllabus: LEI 4501: Legal Aspects of Recreation, Parks and Tourism (3 Credits)

The University indeed has a department of Recreational Sports.

Sense of Unease in Some Black Voters

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — For weeks now, James Jones has been extra courteous in traffic and at the gas station because he has an Obama sticker on the back of his truck. “Something like that might make a difference for Barack Obama,” Mr. Jones explained. “I’m not taking a chance.”

I never did get my car magnet, and I'm disappointed.

in conversations with about a dozen Jacksonville residents in cafes, outside churches and at their homes over three days, Mr. Jones and many of his black neighbors worry anyway, unable to put aside the nagging feeling that somehow their votes will not be counted.

Florida was a key in the 2000 election results.

Wounds have not healed here in Duval County since the mangled presidential election of 2000, when more than 26,000 ballots were discarded as invalid for being improperly punched. Nearly 40 percent of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly Democratic-leaning African-American communities around Jacksonville, a reality that has caused suspicions of racial bias to linger, even though intentional disenfranchisement was never proved.

26 thousand votes would have elected Al Gore.

But amid excitement over Mr. Obama’s historic candidacy and the chance that the country might choose an African-American president within a matter of days, there is an unmistakable sense of anxiety among blacks here that something will go wrong, that victory will slip away.






James Jones, an Obama supporter, at his home in Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife, Mary, and two of their three sons, James Jr., left, and Anthony.

Hurricane Ike rumbles on

Ike is in the Gulf of Mexico. This picture is as of 1.15 UTC (8.15pm EDT).

Hurricane Ike moves along

This image is as of 16.45 UTC, co-ordinated universal time (Greenwich). Eastern time is -5, so this picture is as of 11.45am.

Hurricane Hannah

Gustav slammed into Louisiana late last week, and today Hannah hit the Carolinas and moved up the East Coast. rained a lot in Chichester today, but not a terrible thing, really. Though: look east of Florida, and look at Hurrican Ike working its way over.

The Bricklayer’s Sons

I don't know if it's me. Usually Michiko Kakutani's reviews sparkle. Yet I find her review of this new book strange, and not in a way I like.

The Bricklayer’s Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11 - 'The Bin Ladens' By Steve Coll
Reviewed by MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Steve Coll’s book reveals the crucial role that Osama bin Laden’s relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping him.

It starts off well enough: Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.

Okay. Mention is made of other books, Steve Coll's Ghost wars : the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004), and Jacob Weisberg's The Bush tragedy. Ms. Kakutani asserts the latter "underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W Bush's presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq," and that Coll's new book "underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America."

Alright, so far, fine. Oedipal rivalries and Freudian dynamics are useful tools for an author of books and a writer of book reviews. A further useful tool is what is known as "six degrees of separation," which asserts that any one person in the world is no more separated from any other than by six degrees (he knows her, and she knows him, and the like, until the circle is closed).

To wit: We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III , the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.

And: We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.

The implications of James Baker doing legal work for bi Laden senior, of his being a long-time Bush confidante and political ally who would serve in George Herbert Walker Bush's administration (and also represent W in Florida when that state's votes were hanging by a dimpled chad back in November of 2000), are left unexplored for this comment, that utterly baffles me.

Salem [bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother] emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent, who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in seven languages.”

Huh?

Pull the plug on the library

One man's view on libraries, and he isn't sympathetic. A sampling:

According to the Alachua District library's own Web site, the library had 1.2 million visits last year. I am guessing this means that the turnstiles clicked over 1.2 million times, no telling what for. But let's stipulate that all those entrances were to actually use the library services and not just to get a drink of water, use the bathroom or escape the elements. The budget for the coming year is $19 million. That means that each visit costs over $15.

And so it continues.

And it gets even better. If my property tax bill is any indication, elimination of the library would result in an immediate 5.1 percent tax cut! I mean how hard can it be to sell a 5.1 percent tax cut to each and every property owner in Alachua County? I don't have the exact number in front of me, but I am guessing that it's over 70,000 people who would experience direct tax relief.


Well, it doesn't faze him that he's unsure about the number, but sure about his point.

The county commissioners are warning that the sky is falling because of a potential $3 million mandated tax cut. Here is a chance to cut six times that amount with no reduction in essential services.


My emphasis, his point.