The US-Mexico Frontier becomes truly lawless!

Will somebody please tell me that this is just a bad April Fool's joke?! Please!! Well some people sure are laughing with the Bush administration's Dept. of Homeland Security happily waiving off all environmental and land-management laws to build a fence to keep those illegal Mexicans out! That's right! Really, this just happened: Michael Chertoff and Dubya Bush just waved their national security want, and *poof* - all the laws that protect landowners and the environment and wildlife - they are all gone!! Bye-bye to all those pesky regulations that constrain the construction of such large-scale monstrosities (the proposed fence is some 670-miles long) that can fundamentally alter the very landscape for the foreseeable future, by requiring that such projects do everything possible to minimize their impact on the environment, landscape, wildlife, and people living in those landscapes. Which one of those things needs protecting anyway, when we're facing them Mexicans, for surely that is the biggest threat to the American Way Of Life! Those immigrants must surely be stopped, along with the jaguars and the ocelots who might be trespassing if not fornicating in them border regions. Who needs them anyway?

The LA Times has more on the story, so go read it there: I can't write any more for fear of turning into blithering incoherence as I try to comprehend this latest horror. How long can they get away and keep getting away with shit like this?! Who can stop them? Maybe you (at least the US citizens reading this) can reverse this if you get on the phone/fax/email/horn and yell at your congressperson and senator and anyone else who might listen - or make them listen - to do something about this.

Or give me a shout back if you can tell me this is all an April Fool's joke! Otherwise the joke really is on all of us, especially in the border regions - and who knows where else they will waive these laws next?