Folks can always understand someone making a mistake....

..... because it's "human" to make mistakes! We can always forgive someone who makes a mistake. Remember when your Mom would say to you, "That's alright dear, it was an honest mistake!" With an honest mistake...you knew you had done something wrong, but you knew it was going to be alright. Whatever you'd done wasn't really malicious and could be corrected. Like using your mom's silverware to dig in the dirt, or breaking a window with your baseball.

What makes us step back & scratch our heads in wonder, is when someone makes the same mistake more than once. What's that old Einstein quote about 'insanity'...."doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." Lindsey Lohan might be a current example of this, or for those of you as old as I am, Willy Sutton the bank robber who spent most of his life in and out of prisons for robbing over 100 banks during the first half of the last century! ("Cause that's where the money is!")

Well, I think the American is going to start learning about "Einstein's insanity theory" very shortly.

There's a story coming to light around the country concerning illegal immigration - and when you hear about it, I think you're going to scratch your heads at first, and then you're going to get mad, like I did. If it wasn't so scary, it would be hilarious. If it didn't already have such tragic consequences it would just be incredible! It's a story that shows the inefficiency and total ineffectiveness of our national security system. Top to bottom - no one in this story is immune from criticism! Included are, one of my hero's a former President, the current President, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service (ICE), Congress, The Department of Justice (DOJ), various State government and Local Law Enforcement agencies, sheriffs and jail administrators.

I was first turned onto the story by a friend of mine who asked me what I thought? I did some research. The story first surfaced as part of the Lou Dobbs Tonight Show on Thursday September 13th. I got the show's transcripts and just shook my head after reading it. It was a story originally reported by Lisa Sylvester, a pretty good reporter. Here's the story's lead paragraph that will just knock your socks off....taken directly from the Show's transcripts .....

LISA SYLVESTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Department of Homeland Security inspector general estimates more than 300,000 illegal aliens convicted of crimes will be locked up and stayed in local jails this year. After serving their time, instead of being deported, most will be released onto U.S. streets because Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have the resources or bed space to (d)report them.

I didn't include a lot of what the transcript reported because frankly - it was depressing - and you can find it yourself on the CNN website! A little perspective may be necessary........

• a group of 300,000 convicted and already incarcerated criminals,
• more than two and a half times as many CONVICTS as we have soldiers in Iraq
• will be RELEASED into our cities and towns - to walk among our family members and friends
• because those sworn to protect us - can't get it together enough to FIGURE IT OUT.

GEEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Taking a deep breath!)

Now I have the benefit of a little more information than you do, but what it boils down to is that all of the organizations I mentioned above, are pointing at each other saying, "it's their problem not ours." Sound familiar? "Honest Dad, I don't know how the lamp broke, Johnny was playing inside and I heard a bang and when I came in the lamp was broken!" Unfortunately there have already been murders because of this stupidity! The three college students murdered in Newark, were killed by an illegal Peruvian immigrant who had already been arrested and released twice for a) raping a 5 year old girl and b) assaulting a number of people in a bar fight. How nice. No wonder there are people who hate us, laughing tonight!

So here's my cast of who's culpable ........

• President Ronald Reagan for signing an amnesty program for 3 million way back when - and not forcing INS and the Border Patrol to get nasty out there.
• Congress for allowing Sen. Ted Kennedy to push through 7 - count'em S E V E N - national bills that made illegal immigration easier and border enforcement and deportation harder.
• President George W. Bush for signing the Security and Prosperity Partnership with Mexico and Canada which reduced our country's sovereignty and moved us one step closer to a borderless continent.
• The Department of Homeland Security: with nearly 130,000 employees the department least likely to keep the homeland secure!
• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: part of DHS, a group of over 15,000 employees and a budget of over $4 billion, that touts itself as an integrated 21st century law enforcement agency!
• the Department of Justice: home of the United States Attorney General who has to be aware of this sort of thing.
• various State Government and Local Law Enforcement agencies, sheriffs and jail administrators: the folks on the bottom of this "food chain," but the ones most responsible for keeping our families safe on a daily basis! These are the people who's salaries our taxes pay for!

Of all of these groups, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the organization that drives me around the bend the worst! You'd think that with a budget of $4 billion dollars and countless years to figure it out, they'd at least have come up with a method to remove the worst group of illegal aliens out of the 12 million illegal aliens already here. What makes it worse is that ICE doesn't even have to go looking for these bad guys....these 300,000 are already in jail! All they have to do is pick them up and deport them back to their home countries jail system! (It would be prudent if our government reached an agreement with the "sending" governments that they'd better keep these bad-boys locked up, or else there might be treaty or trade complications, but ICE doesn't need to get involved with that - that's where our Executive branch should work its magic!)

And what kind of an argument is "we don't have the resources" to deal with them? How can a 12 month budget of $4 BILLION DOLLARS not be enough? That's 4,000 individual stacks of one-million dollars each. That's more than three-hundred thirty-three million dollars A MONTH! I tell you what --- you give me and Sheriff Joe Arpaio three months time and three months of that budget, and we'll have you the dandiest, most effective, most amazing, and most remotely located incarceration center you've ever seen! And we'll work out the long term leasing arrangements with the hosting country! We'll also write the procedures manual you'll have to follow in subsequent years!

But it's not just the mindlessness of ICE and Homeland Security that are at fault here. Your State, County and Local Law Enforcement also bear a major burden in all of this. It's their job to keep you and I safe. PERIOD! Telling "society" after the fact that they had to release a known criminal just because they couldn't get a return call from ICE, is as bad as watching the criminal commit a crime and doing nothing about it! That's not making an honest mistake, that nearly being criminally culpable! Isn't there a legal term like criminal facilitation? An action you take - releasing a known criminal - back onto an unsuspecting society - directly results in another crime?

If our Federal, State and Local governments are going to continue this "catch & release" program, then citizens should be allowed to carry weapons for their protection. The release of criminal illegal aliens should be announced a few days in advance and their pictures prominently displayed on television and in all Police & Post Offices. Citizens could not be held liable if their weapons accidentally discharged around or into a previously arrested, convicted, incarcerated, released, illegal alien. Wouldn't that be insane?

What's more lucid - releasing a criminal you already have locked up, who you know is going to commit another crime - or allowing a normally law abiding citizen take justice into their own hands because you won't can't? Am I making you crazy yet? Doesn't it seem more sane to keep a criminal you already have locked up - locked up?

"Meum cerebrum nocet!"