Just when you think that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio can’t get any cooler, he comes up with another great idea.

A sheriff known for housing inmates in old military tents has a new idea–a chain gang of drunken driving convicts wearing pink shirts and performing burials of people who died of alcohol abuse.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he wants the chain gang to act as a deterrent to potential drunken drivers. He has already used the color pink on inmates–he issued them pink underwear.

“Maybe this will warn people — knock it off, don’t drink and drive,” Arpaio said. “You’ll end up in pink underwear on the chain gang.”
[DUI Inmates Don Pink in Ariz. Chain Gang, Google AP, December 12, 2007]

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has become acclaimed for his tough but fair treatment of illegal alien prisoners in his charge. (See Let a Thousand Arpaiovilles Bloom.)

Incidentally, those pink underwear items are becoming popular. A man was recently arrested for stealing some boxers upon his release from jail: Inmate admits stealing jail’s pink underwear, 3TV, November 29, 2007.

The sheriff says it would have been easier to just buy them.

“This is a famous color all over the world,” said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. “It’s in pubs in England and museums. We sell thousands and thousands of this, legitimately, to the public. The money goes to the posse.”

Ironically, the sheriff decided to dye the underwear a conspicuous pink after inmates kept stealing the plain white ones with “MCSO” stamped on the seat.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy just noticed something that Steve Sailer noticed a while back :

The Volokh Conspiracy - Congress Is Making It Harder to Obtain or Refinance a Mortgage.–
[Jim Lindgren, December 12, 2007 at 8:45pm] Trackbacks
For years, Congress had been pushing lenders to lend vigorously in poor neighborhoods and to avoid redlining. This effort worked–only too well.

Now Congress has discovered “predatory lending.”

If you’re a lender, you get blamed for racism either way.

The blogger Rhymes With Right gave this NY Times excerpt the title “Like This Is A Bad Thing.” The insertions in square brackets are mine, the NYT sometimes has difficulty making things clear:

Advocates for [illegal] immigrants contend that, at a minimum, hundreds of people unauthorized to work have left the state or been fired. Some school districts have at least partly attributed enrollment drops [and the consequent massive savings in taxpayer dollars] to the law. Though the housing slump and seasonal economic factors make it difficult to pin down how much is attributable to the new law, illegal workers say employers are checking papers and are less inclined to hire them.

“They started asking everybody for papers one day, and those like me that didn’t have them [because we're illegal]were fired,” said Luis Baltazar, a Mexican [illegal] immigrant who worked for a paving company until a few weeks ago and was soliciting work at a day labor hiring hall here.

Another [illegal] immigrant, Jose Segovia, said work had plummeted in the past few weeks, more so than in the four previous Decembers he spent in Phoenix. “Some of my [illegal] friends went back to Mexico,” Mr. Segovia said, “and I am thinking of going, too, if it doesn’t get better here.”[Arizona Is Split Over Hard Line On Immigrants, By Randal C. Archibold, December 14, 2007]

And there’s a photograph of some workers, presumably [illegal], with the caption “Day laborers looking for work in Phoenix on Wednesday. Some say a law that takes effect Jan. 1 has made jobs harder to find.”.

Well, it has if you’re [illegal], but not if you’re an American–theLaw of Supply and Demand says that it would make jobs easier to find for Americans.

Since June 2006, the Chandler Rapist in Chandler, Arizona has raped at least five girls between 12 and 14 years of age, and will rape many more, if local Spanish radio station KMYL (1190 AM) has anything to say about it. Although according to descriptions by all five rape victims, the Chandler Rapist is Hispanic, the folks at KMYL, as represented by vice president for programming at New Radio Venture, KMYL’s parent company, Mayra Nieves, don’t want anyone to know that crucial fact. Nieves has demanded that Chandler police stop informing the public that the rapist is Hispanic. She ordered police to instead refer to the suspect as having “dark skin.” She said, “I think this is racial profiling,” and also accused police of “stereotyping.”

East Valley Tribune staffer Nicole Beyer reports, “Nieves said Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race — and many Hispanics are white or black. She said ethnicity should not be used when describing an attacker.”[Calling rapist a Hispanic irks radio station, By Nicole Beyer, East Valley Tribune, November 10, 2007.]
Aside from the issue of whether “Hispanic” is even an ethnicity (traditionally, “ethnicity” refers to one’s nationality, or that of one’s forebears, e.g., “Mexican”), when people hear “dark skin,” they tend to think, “black.” And so, had the Chandler Police Department acquiesced to Nieves’ demands, in the vicinity of Andersen Junior High School, where the five rapes and a sixth attack in November that stopped short of rape have all taken place, people would be on the lookout for a black rapist, and lower their guard in the face of a Hispanic.
Misleading the public in this case serves the interest of only one person: The rapist.
Fortunately, the police were insubordinate to Mayra Nieves.

“But Chandler police spokesman Sgt. Rick Griner said his department will stand by its description, saying they release the details the victims give them.“‘It would be irresponsible on our part to change or alter that,’ he said.”

The rapist is described as “Hispanic, 28 to 40 years old, short [5’6” in some reports] with a muscular build, dark hair and hazel or brown eyes,” and during last month’s attack “was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans.” He has also been described as having black hair and a mustache.

Fox News’ Melissa Underwood quotes the CPD’s Sgt. Griner as responding,

“They are wanting a skin color. How do you classify a skin color?” Griner said. “What might be dark to me might not be dark to you. We’re going off what [the victims] are telling us.”[Spanish-Language Radio Station Slams Police for Describing Suspect as 'Hispanic', Melissa Underwood, Fox News, November 14, 2007.]

According to reporters Kevin Tripp and Sandra Haros of news radio station KTAR (92.3 FM), “Radio station 1190AM refused to use the word ‘Hispanic’ when it broadcast the description.” Apropos of nothing, Mayra Nieves “said the man may look Hispanic, but may not be.”

Nieves told WTAR that police should ignore victim reports (or is that just victim reports by non-Hispanics?) identifying assailants as Hispanic, even when the assailants speak fluent Spanish, and also spoke of Mestizos as an exclusively non-Hispanic group.

``It’s feeding more into the anti-Hispanic sentiment that everybody’s saying is not there, but is seen everywhere,” Nieves said “For me, saying he’s Hispanic because the victims are saying he’s Hispanic, is actually doing racial profiling.”

“By the fact that someone looks dark doesn’t mean that he’s Hispanic,” she said. “Even if he has an accent, as some people have said, it could be an Arab, it could be someone from mestizo descent. We don’t know. We don’t know if he’s Hispanic….”
“But, she said, 1190 AM listeners, are ‘confused and enraged because we are saying this person is Hispanic and immediately profiling this guy. And we don’t know, we don’t know if he is Hispanic or not. That is something people are very disgusted about.’”[Hispanics Protest Rapist's Description, By Kevin Tripp and Sandra Haros, KTAR, November 9th, 2007.]

But 1190 isn’t saying the rapist is Hispanic!

(Unfortunately, KTAR’s editor further muddled things with a misleading title: It wasn’t “Hispanics” who protested, but one radio station.)

Tripp and Haros also published the letter (reprinted below in its entirety, including spelling and grammatical errors) that Nieves claimed to have sent to the Chandler PD, but which the CPD denied having received.

Dear Public Information Officers,
I would like to call your attention to a misleading detail in the description of the suspect that you are providing regarding the case of the Chandler rapist.
You describe him as a “Hispanic male, 28-40 years old, short and stocky with muscular build, dark hair, hazel or brown eyes. Base [sic] on your description the person [sic] skin color is not mentioned. It doesn’t tell me if the suspect is white, black or mestizo. The fact that the suspect may also speak English and Spanish fluently, by the accounts of witnesses [sic], doesn’t make this person necessarily a Hispanic. There are people from other ethnic groups that also speak fluent Spanish.
By calling this suspect a “Hispanic male” we are stereotyping the suspect and hurting the search by limiting what people should be looking for. There are many other ethnic groups that could also fit the description that we see in the drawing. By your sketch, this suspect could also be a [sic] Phillipino [sic], Arab, African American, French, Italian, Morocan [sic], etc… [sic]
I hope you can make the correction. Thank you very much for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Mayra Nieves
VP Programming - New Radio Venture
“Colorado’s and Phoenix [sic] only Spanish News/Talk Radio”
La Buena Onda 1150 - Denver
La Buena Onda 1190 - Phoenix - (602) 433 1190

Not even the ACLU would back Nieves, saying “They are using concrete information to follow up leads.”

As laughable as Mayra Nieves is, she should not be laughed off. A few years ago, her ilk wouldn’t dare pull such a pathetic stunt; today, the Mayra Nieveses have no inhibitions regarding such theatrics. Remember the recent incident in Los Angeles, in which Hispanic school activists called black American parents “racist” for demanding that school district advisory board meetings be held in English?

And no matter how idiotic the position of a Hispanic chauvinist, another Hispanic or non-Hispanic from the open borders lobby will come up with some shameless sophistry in support of her.

Thus did Ad Age’s affirmative action blogger and supporter of Hispanic rapists, Laura Martinez, come to Nieves’ defense by offering the existence of white, blonde-haired Spanish TV stars as “proof” that the term “Hispanic” has no descriptive power. As if the five rape victims might have been talking about some blonde-haired, white guy.

Illegal Hispanic immigrants and their Hispanic citizen and open borders lobby supporters have learned the lessons of black race hustlers all too well. And patriots must be ready to stand up to them, as many times as it takes.

It’s easy to forget that two of the most famous European authors of the 19th Century were significantly black:

• - Alexandre Dumas the Father, the colossally popular author of “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” was the grandson of a Haitian slave woman. Here’s a picture. (His not quite as famous, but still well-remembered illegitimate son of the same name, the author of “Camille,” the inspiration for Verdi’s “La Traviata,” was therefore the great-grandson of a slave. Here’s a picture.)
• - Alexander Pushkin, the national poet of Russian, the first great writer in the Russian language, isn’t that well-known in the West because he was a poet whose genius is notoriously lost in translation, but to Russians, he’s The Man. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, are all very fine, but Russians venerate Pushkin with an unparalleled passion. Pushkin was the great-grandson of an Ethiopian (or perhaps Cameroonian or Chadian – it’s all kind of murky) slave renamed Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became, apparently, a godson of Peter the Great, then a general in the Czarist army, a military engineer, and the governor of a Russian province. (It’s a wild story. Somebody ought to make a movie about this guy’s life!) Voltaire supposedly called Gannibal “the dark star of the Enlightenment,” although it’s hard to nail down the facts about him. What we do know is that Pushkin identified closely with his African ancestor, and began a book about him called “The Blackamoor of Petersburg.” Pushkin often played up his African ancestry, which just made him even more exotic and charismatic to Russians. Pushkin said, “The black African who had become a Russian noble lived out his life like a French philosophe.”

By the way, a village on the Russian Black Sea coast was found in Czarist times to consist of 500 African-looking people, who became known as the “Batumi Negroes.”

For a quick review of the charmingly comic opera-ish relations between Czarist Russia and Africa, including Russia’s aid to Christian Ethiopia in fighting off Italian invasion in 1896 and the Cossack attempt to conquer Ethiopia in 1898, see here.

The New York Times notes in Brazilians Giving Up Their American Dream, [by Nina Bernstein and Elizabeth Dwoskin, December 4, 2007] that

“In Massachusetts, says Fausto da Rocha, the founder of the Boston-area Brazilian Immigrant Center, his compatriots — many here illegally — are leaving by the thousands, some after losing homes in the subprime mortgage crisis.”

Here’s VDARE.com’s take on the issue from almost 4 years ago:The Mortgage Monsters Meet The Immigration Invasion. They Like Each Other., March 31, 2004