somebody is finally getting serious about immigration

On Friday, an extremely strict bill was signed by Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona. Highlights of the bill include the ability of the police to detain anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant based on reasonable suspicion, and making it a misdemeanor to not to carry immigration documents. Arizona, being a border state, has serious problems from illegal immigration, but is this the direction we need to be moving in to deal with the problem of illegal immigration?

In my opinion, this is a wrong turn. Yes, this issue needs to be handled, and a drastic change in our immigration policies is needed. But to give the power to the police to legally harass possible U.S. citizens based on their discretion is a very bad idea. The governor urges people to trust law enforcement, but many others, myself included, do not think that we should rely on the discretion of the police. From my own personal experience, and the experiences of close friends, the police already profile and harass people enough without being given more power. I have a lot of respect for police officers that lay their lives on the line everyday to maintain order for us citizens, all while being underpaid. However, that kind of authority position tends to attract people that wear their badges as a crown and basically operate as a legalized gang. No one can deny that there are a few too many police officers who are simply uneducated, uninformed bigots that use their authority to harass minority groups, teenagers, or pretty girls just because they can. This kind of law that just got signed by Arizona will give such police officers even more power to do just that. I agree that there needs to be a change in how we handle illegal immigrants, but not like this. I would not feel comfortable placing my trust in the police force on an issue such as this, especially if I were a legal Latino immigrant.

Response to the SEC porn watching thing

It has just come to my attention that during the panic of the financial crisis, the SEC has been watching porn while our country goes belly up. Yes, porn. Sexually explicit or sexually suggestive material has been found on government computers and at least 33 SEC employees or contractors have been essentially caught with their pants down on "official" time. Since more than half of these diligent, hard working individuals make between $99,000 and $223,000 per year while I currently am barely scraping buy on a few bucks an hour (without time for any porn watching), I am incensed by this. These cases all took place within the last 5 years, which, if I remember correctly, was a pivitol moment for our country in regards to finances. To my further disappointment, it was not merely the lowly office drones who might have been spending a little too much time in the office for too long due to the crisis, it was the senior agency staffers. And as if that isn't bad enough that they were doing it at all, the amount of time that some individuals spent doing it was pretty astounding to me. Acoording to this article in Associate Press, SEC Inspector General David Kotz posted a memo detailing certain cases. An SEC senior attorney spent 8 hours a day watching porn on a company computer. He ran out of hard drive space so he burned all his smut to cds and had them in boxes around his office. If I wasn't so outraged by this, I might admire on some sick level the life that this man had carved out for himself. Get paid the big bucks to pleasure yourself all day, maybe look at a few boring legal documents about the country being out of money or something, clock out, go home and relax after a hard days work. My life currently looks absolutley nothing at all like this in any way, shape, or form. Can somebody please tell me what I am doing wrong?