Check out this cartoon. Then check out the landscape of El Paso. The cartoonist is so taken with the horror of the planned border fence (whether real or virtual) that s/he doesn’t see the irony in their own back yard.

El Paso is littered with rock walls. Practically every home has a wall surrounding its back yard. Businesses are divided by them. Streets and schools enjoy the coolness of the shadows they provide. FBI agents lurk behind them, looking for the next bribe-taking local yokel politician stumbling toward a wad of cash.

Fact is, El Paso is the embodiment of the sentiment expressed in this cartoon: it seems people think that some problems in El Paso can apparently be solved by building rock walls everywhere.

If they don’t think that, then why do they build so many of them?

–Walls to keep out news of suicidally-drunk underage teenage drivers screaming down Country Club at three in the morning.

–Walls to keep us from seeing the legion of abused and neglected pets in our unthinking neighbors’ yards.

–Walls to keep us from viewing the latest TAKS scores from our next generation of geniuses (or bribe-takers).

–Walls to hide us from the view of white and African-American beggars at street-corners, selling candy and bullshit at Airway & Montana, Fred Wilson & 54, or Redd & North Desert.

–Walls to keep out the latest bad news of the antics of the Commissioners Court.

And one more thing. The author of the article, listed as a Professor Emeritus at Sul Ross, should go back to school. His analogy to the Berlin Wall misses on a main point: it was East Germany that erected that wall, not West Germany. To bring his fantasy to reality, then, it would be Mexico building the wall on the Southwest Border, not the United States.

Well, “emeritus” means “retired” in academic circles, and for that, we can come out from around our own wall, and be thankful.

So ASARCO got their air quality permit, thanks to the State of Taxes Texas.

An air quality permit is not the same as a politically-accurate permit asserting that the quality of air emitted by Texas bureaucrats is any finer than the sublime perfumes of the nearest stockyard.

It’s just a permit, and permits are permitted, by law and by the very nature of the word.

That’s the reality of how home-grown carpetbaggers roll in The Lone Stud State.

Thus, despite our potentially-choked lungs and could-be lead-laden watery eyes (or not), and surrounded by our devoted MS-afflicted offspring and our three-legged dogs, we are pushing through with a series of parodies. The first comes now, and why did ASARCO make it so easy for us?

Now here’s a world-class ASARCO original ™ ad, suitable for parody naked adulation. Note the dramatic effect of black-and-white postering, which is not to say it’s fascist in design, as there are no red spot color calls that would complete the Teutonic Triumvirate of black-white-red (often used by Nazis, South American political parties, Chicano farm workers movements and beret-wearing, scooter-riding, grandma-killing commie Guevaristas (which is the same as at least one Obama campaign worker). The designer could have just had a bad day. What with the bankruptcy and uncertainty over pay stubs, it’s possible ASARCO had to cull the bottom of the advertisorial barrel for a graphic artist who would work in exchange for stock futures. Which is not to say the Artist was a punk, except s/he could have been just a tad desperate. Or s/he could have been a corporate wonk alarmingly left alone with PowerPoint of a frantic afternoon, with a 5 p.m. deadline to fax ad thumbnails to Guadalupe or Rio de Right Wing, Argentina, or Hull, or Kosovo, or wherever ASARCO decides its off-shore corporate HQ is this week. (Click for full-sized badness):

And here’s our new ad, built during an all-nighter in between coughing jags, blood tests for lead poisoning at the ER, and furious phone consultations with both lead poisoning specialists at the Mayo Clinic and alcohol-poisoning specialists at Acetunas (click for full-sized goodness and click again for print-sized wonderfulness, if your so-called Internet browser supports that):

Later on, once we’ve exhausted all medical approaches to our health issues as well as creative approaches to parodying ASARCO, we’re going to explore other reasons for Mayor Crook’s Cook’s opposition to the re-opening of ASARCO. Can anyone say “land grab?”

Can anyone say, “FBI El Paso Corruption Investigation?” We knew you could.

Sonora state legislators have complained about Arizona’s new employer sanctions law, which punishes those who hire illegal aliens.

By doing so, they hope to co-opt existing American cultural systems, laws and norms to suit their needs.

After all, it beats having the intellect, moral strength and political acumen to deal with their self-made failures. Evolutionary biology explains all, in this case.

Hat Tip: Stop the ACLU.

Michelle Malkin notes a recent recent Judicial Watch FOIA request on the number of Mexican military and police incursions into the US.

Noted. Still, it’s a fact that Mexican organized criminal enterprises routinely adopt the uniforms, weapons and vehicles of federal, state and local enforcement entities (including the Mexican military, which has an internal security role and targets drug traffickers). I doubt all of these incursions were by military or law enforcement members. The notorious Hudspeth County, TX, incident in 2006, which was widely reported, was likely such a situation, as corrupt Mexican soldiers are really a bit more sophisticated (yes, sophisticated) and wouldn’t so easily allow themselves to be so exposed. Some other incursions were by mistake — losing one’s bearings happens more than you might think along remote parts of the Southwest Border, and US law enforcement entities have done it as well (though certainly not as often as Mexican LE). The rest of the incursions? That’s the problem not sufficiently addressed by either the US or the government of Mexico.

Here’s the incursion report, courtesy of Judicial Watch.

Malkin notes that this candidate has a lot to say on immigration, little of it good or, well, even consistent. You might say it’s enough to make you cry. And that guacamole reference? Please, patronize Latinos some more, will ya?

One Malkin commenter argues for the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to patrol the border. That’s a slow interagency process, held up by the public servants at the FAA. If Katrina can’t make the FAA move faster, what makes you think a little thing like national sovereignty will?

Border security is serious business, and government policies on immigration are complex, convoluted and sometimes out-of-date (think citizenship by birth), which is why this satire, and this one, hit home.

Remember Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, the drug smuggler who was paid by the U.S. to help convict USBP agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean for shooting him in the ass when he was smuggling marijuana into the US in 2005?

He’s about as dumb as we thought he was back then.

El Paso Times notes his tearful family letting that Aldrete crossed into the US because he thought he was getting more money from the feds — for Christmas gifts.

You can’t make this stuff up. One hundred and twenty-nine other dummies just got rounded up in El Paso in the same way. High IQ is not highly-regarded among the criminal set along the border.

Aldrete, who lives in Juarez, from where he gazed lovingly at the William Beaumont Army Hospital in El Paso where he received ace medical attention, had said he’d never cross back into the US — with or without a load of dope, presumably.

I expect Aldrete will have a lot more worries about his backside in prison than the bullet lodged there a couple of years ago. While Ramos and Compean have suffered from inmates’ abuse, this celebrity trafficker will be (in)famous enough to learn about new ways to make his butt-ocks hurt. They really ought to get TVs out of prisons.

Patterico links to the news, and Johnny Sutton’s name turns up in the comments, like a chow chip under your boot.

Diggers Realm has more.