Home of Today's Common Sense

We are deep in the election season now. Hillary and Barack are duke-ing it out nationally with the next installment due in a few weeks when the Pennsylvania primary is held. There is also an ongoing serial of the Florida – Michigan debacle. What to do so that the voters of those two states will be included as real voting citizens by the Democrats. Recently, here in Texas the fact of the caucus and its importance in the Democratic nomination process was amplified by the contentiousness of the elections. In the twenty years I have lived here I have never seen any other public information encouraging voters to participate, though I was generally aware of the process. When I asked some precinct leaders about it, they advised that it was rare that regular voters participated in the caucuses. When you consider the “superdelagates” that are mostly elite insiders and the discrete caucus procedure it appears that the elite of the party do not believe that “We the people” should choose our leaders but really wants to dictate the outcome of elections – or should we say that they want to coronate their royalty.  More »

Published Brownsville Herald March 9, 2008

This week we heard that the “technology based” border protection package was delivered and the “Secretary of Homeland Security” proclaimed it up and ready as he had seen it personally. Then we heard that it didn’t work! I wonder what it was that was working – obviously politics was working.

I have been silent on this issue as I am very biased. I worked for U.S. Customs for more than 25 years and then watched a formerly efficient entity with a clear purpose, be combined into a mess of other agencies without a clear direction for anyone. 

The border control problem has not been approached in reality, it has only been fiddled with in order to satisfy some segments of certain political constituencies. To my knowledge no nation has ever been able to effectively control their borders, the iron curtain did and the bamboo curtain does a better job than most but only because they are not afraid to shoot. The only thing we had going for the “fence” was the use of technology, the physical fence only promises to divide our nation and even neighbors in our community as no other thing has. Just here in Brownsville the University will be segmented by the fence and individual properties that have been in the came families long before the United States was formed are being seized. Promises of continuing litigation abound!  More »