Get ready for some Southern Border hysteria from the wingnuts, HANNITY, Minutemen, et al.

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Incidents of shots fired at fishermen back in May and now this jet-ski married couple have all resulted from these persons crossing over the international boundary into the Mexico side.

Back in May there was an inflammatory article funneled through ABC that was written by a (student?) associated with a college in FLORIDA, which used the totally charged word "pirates" and featured this Sheriff Sigifredo GONZALEZ, Jr, who is an attention whore, publicity hound, who has been featured by HANNITY and others pouring gas on fires. He is the chairman of the Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition, one of the engines that Governor Goodhair uses to fire up the wildeyed border wingnut hysterics. This program is used to get regular law enforcement officers to expand into Border Patrol and immigration duties. More scrupulous and NOT-John-Wayne type sheriffs and officers have refused to play along with encroaching into federal border duties, like the central issue in the Arizona law. Back then I had an e-mail exchange with the writer of the ABC article, starting with pointing out the emotionally charged "pirate" word. At first he said that the definition of piracy, as given to him by that Sheriff, is any criminal activity that occurs on the water. Fine, but he was very receptive and didn't know about this Sheriff's acting as a tool for the wingnut xenophobes. A month or two later the NBC affiliate out of Houston was running with an almost identical story line about pirates and the fear of invasion at the border.

Now, not blaming the victims, but the fishermen and jet skiers continue their activities at a high tourism level, and THEY didn't seem to participate in the wingnut xenophobic hysteria before. You'd think the Sheriff would expend all of his Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition monies on outreach to tell tourists to stay on the U.S. side of the border. That program is like Shrub's use of "compassionate conservatism" to fund churches and to divert funds from government social services to churches that would then deliver their congregations to his crappy politics.

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/7226528.html

Man missing after border lake shooting identified

ZAPATA, Texas — A sheriff says a 30-year-old man reported shot on a lake on the Texas-Mexico border had just moved back to the United States after working in Mexico.

Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez says David Michael Hartley and his wife moved to McAllen, Texas, from the Mexican border city of Reynosa about five months ago. Gonzalez says the Hartleys had planned to returned to their native Colorado in two weeks.

Gonzalez says the shooting was a random attack.

Gonzalez says Hartley was shot in the back of the head Thursday on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake on the Rio Grande in an ambush by armed boaters. It happened near the U.S. boundary of a lake where run-ins with pirates already had fishermen and Texas officials on alert.



http://www.themonitor.com/articles/-43245--.html

McAllen man presumed dead after pirate shooting on Falcon Lake

.... “We can only stay at that boundary and see if we can spot anything,” said Capt. Fernando Cervantes of Texas Park and Wildlife Department in Zapata. “Visitors need to know it’s not safe to go to Mexico, and if anything happens over there, we cannot help them.” ....

Falcon Lake has seen a relative calm since a string of pirate shakedowns of fishermen in May, Cervantes said,

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1. This is the first time I didn't get the Gawker take & replied to the author's e-addy

The Gawker story: http://gawker.com/5653046/there-are-pirates-on-the-mexican-border

What I e-mailed to the Gawker dude:

This is the first time that I haven't been able to tell whether the dead-on Gawker tongue was in cheek or not. I can't ever remember disagreeing with the Enlightened, Liberal Gawker point of view. This time there's doubt that you are falling prey to wingnut xenophobia in line with HANNITY, O'REILLY, the Teabaggers, and the Minutemen. EMPHASIS: Every such incident has been because of Americans crossing into Mexico territory. Governor GOODHAIR, in his many Shrub-Lite ways, has tried paler versions of the Arizona law and of Shrub's "faith-based" methods of funneling cash away from government social services into church outlets in pathetically clear gimmicks to buy their allegiance. So, Goodhair has pushed something called the "Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition," that tries to get border law enforcement officers to blur their specific duties with encroachments into Federal immigration/Border Patrol functions. The head of this program, when other law enforcement personnel have rejected this Arizona-Lite approach, is the sheriff named in these newspaper articles, and is a tool for HANNITY and any other hysteria-promoting outlets. The first item below is what I commented as a reader in the newspaper and the hyperlink below that is from a Democratic discussion board:



So like previous attacks in May, again it's Americans "wandering across" to the Mexican side, yet the national media will pick up the hysteria of the emotionally charged word "PIRATES" which will be linked to "TERRORISM" and HANNITY and O'REILLY will froth at the mouth to militarize the border and the rabble rouser politicians will demand MORE Border Patrol, more military, more boats, drones, horses, dunebuggies, BP palace buildings.

Yet the bottom line remains, "If you cross over there we can't do anything." Here's an idea, instead of the Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition going for Arizona-like goals of blurring local law enforcement duties with federal immigration functions, why don't they spend all of their pork barrel cash on OUTREACH to the tourists, fishermen, water sports people to TELL THEM as they enter the border NOT TO CROSS to the Mexico side? Instead of going on the HANNITY show and giving "pirate" interviews to college journalists and fueling national hysteria?

Incidents of shots fired at fishermen back in May and now this jet-ski married couple have all resulted from these persons crossing over the international boundary into the Mexico side.

(Link to this DU thread, here.)

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2. Whoa, GAWKER replied. Me suspects a bandwagon is gonna form up

Who're yuh gonna sustain, a big time media personality or the little DU pal who loves you day after day?!1



from Hamilton NOLAN:

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Okay, fair enough, maybe they shouldn't cross over, but they also shouldn't get shot at, even if they do. Just as Mexicans sneaking into America shouldn't get shot at.

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