Lincoln became increasingly troubled by the spread of slavery into what were then new western territories of a growing nation. He saw this development as a threat to basic American principles where men and women ought to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Slavery, Lincoln believed, robbed many Americans of their basic liberties and freedoms and allowed “some people to eat while others did all the work,” wrote James Oakes, a Lincoln biographer.

Oakes writes in his book about Lincoln, “The Radical and the Republican,” that Lincoln developed his own interpretation of American history to buttress his point about slavery. It began with the Declaration of Independence. The country’s founders, Lincoln believed, “did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects,” Oakes notes.

In words that still ring true today and I believe apply to the 2008 presidential race, Oakes writes that Lincoln believed that the Declaration “set a standard maxim for a free society” that should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading…to people of all colors.”

In other words, a perfect union would never quite be perfect, but what America has attained and can still achieve is worth the fight while appreciating what has been gained.

In 2008, Americans have been witnessed to something that would have been unimaginable to generations past - and one need not go into the distant past to comprehend the utter unlikelihood that an African-American man now stands on the cusp of being the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have seen that while America is far from being a perfect union - and its racial divides continue to trouble the nation - it has nonetheless made the candidacy of Barack Obama not only possible, but a very successful venture. For even if Obama goes on to lose the general election, he has already won in many respects, and more importantly, the nation has gained a victory as well.

There will be more Barack Obamas in America’s political future, but there had to be a first, and the face of this particular pioneer is one born from a father of Kenya and a mother of Kansas, raised by white grandparents, and who left the Hawaiian islands, where he came of age, to come to the mainland and eventually make his significant mark on American history.

For those of us old enough to go through presidents like Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes, it is quite incredible to grasp that an exotic politician named Barack Obama will soon be the presidential nominee of one of America’s two major politicial parties. For the kids of today who are in a tizzy about Obama, getting on the Internet and connecting to their social networks in talking about their candidate, it may be no big deal.

But then they don’t have that personal perspective of recalling a presidential candidate like George Wallace, who ran as an independent in 1968 to represent the resentment of white Southerners to the civil rights movement of that era, and to push back against even the modest gains of African-Americans of those times. To the Wallace voters of 1968, a Barack Obama is something they could not have even conceived or remotely accepted - a black-looking man who is the son of a biracial marriage, and who has the audacity to believe he can be president.

It’s still a long road to November victory for Obama. And given the fact that we live in a great but still imperfect nation, the first African-American candidate with a serious chance of being elected president of the United States is sure to face a slew of racial resentments and stereotypes - both real and imagined.

Still, for Obama just to get to this point, proves we’re long past the days of George Wallace and the segregationists and the institutionalized racism so long ingrained into American life and society. The Declaration of Independence and its ideals , as Lincoln rightly said, are to be “constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained.” The 2008 presidential campaign has already been a long tussle, but given its results thus far, worth laboring for in our grand but imperfect union.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger y Columnista

You know, stuff like the U.S. is now home to over 30 million Hispanics, and that a state like Texas will be majority Latino by 2040, if not sooner, or maybe how kids named Mallory Hernandez are getting into UT-Austin with such frequency that the university recently opened an office in Harlingen to attract even more youngsters from the border.

There’s lots of good news around here. That’s why we need the border wall. See, when a border region that has had its share of knocks gets some momentum going, why not stick a 15-foot wall up to blight the scenery, alientate the local populace that never asked for the thing, and bring the added benefit of making right-wingers in Iowa feel better about border security?

It’s a three-fer.

A congressional panel headed by Democrats hostile to the building of the famed wall came to Brownsville last week. They put on a good show. The local bishop said the wall was no good for various reasons, such as throwing off the spirtuality and karma of our border communities. Some lefty representing some lefty group of some sort said we are all one, we are the world, we are the children, open borders, baby.

But mostly, it was common sense stuff. El Paso congressman Silvestre Reyes, a former Border Patrol sector chief, (what does he know, right?), said border fencing will only work in concentrated stretches and not over the expanse of spaces advocated by the seal-the-border crowd. UT-Brownsville President Juliet Garcia spoke of her institution’s longstanding opposition to the fence for various reasons, including the small detail of how the original fed plan would have cut her campus in two, (is that all?).

Tancredo and his fellow right-wing fence builder in Congress, Duncan Hunter, smirked through the whole thing and were likely thinking, “Dang, there’s lots of Mexicans here!” Terrible Tommy sneered at the good bishop and suggested that the scholarly religious leader of the Brownsville Diocese didn’t really believe in having borders at all. No, no, the bishop said, he did believe in borders, but Terrible Tommy cut him off before he could complete his answer.

Hunter, meanwhile, crowed about how well a border fence had worked in the So Cal/San Diego district he’s from. Any objection to having such a thing here was met by Hunter bragging about how his border fence south of San Diego had cured many ills, and heck, building a border wall is the humane thing to do, Duncan said.

Hunter’s constant mentions of So Cal were so frequent that I kept waiting for a blond skater kid to roll in and tell him, “Dude, this isn’t San Diego. It’s totally different here, like, we have Charro Days here, and everything.”

But, alas, leave it to Tancredo to provide the headline for the day. All the carping about building a border fence finally got to Terrible Tommy. Maybe, he sneered, the feds ought to build a border fence north of Brownsville. Get it? That way Brownsville can be on the Mexican side of the fence where it belongs.

Nice touch, Tom, but I’m wondering. Did you get a chance to stop at Taco Palenque on your way out of town? Good eats, bud, and they might even speak a word of English or two, too, always an added bonus.

The story mentions a number of endangered species along the border that wildlife researchers say will be imperiled by hundreds of miles of border fencing. Some of the wildlife mentioned includes the Sonoran pronghorns and long-nose bats in Arizona and the ocelots and jagurandi, (small cats), of deep South Texas.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is so concerned about all of this that one of its regional directors told customs and border protection officials that its scientists have concluded  some or all of these species may disappear over time with the construction of the border fence, The Post story reported.

Obviously, the fence builders of the political right will hardly be moved by such concerns. They even went after the Pope this week after he had the audacity to say a good word about immigrants in the U.S.  A leading member of that flock, the failed presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, accused the good Pope of “faith-based marketing,” saying Benedict was trying to draw more immigrants, (i.e. Mexicans), to the U.S. to increase the membership of his church in this country.

The endangered state of the Sonoran proghorn and the South Texas ocelot aren’t going to touch terrible Tom’s heart given the crusade on his part to protect American sovereignty and culture from excessive immigration.  The fence is going up. The always personable and affable secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, announced recently that he was unilateraly waving more than 30 environmental and land management laws to meet the urgent deadline of building at least 360 miles of border fencing by year’s end.

Chertoff’s move has been roundly panned in the editorial pages of newspapers across the land - NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle - as a power grab that Congress ought to rescind. The Sierra Club and some other enviromentalist groups are going to federal court to challenge the constitutionality of the authority that Congress gave the grumpy Chertoff to do as he pleases.

Not to worry, says one of Chertoff’s flacks at the department to protect America. A spokeswoman for homeland security tells The Post that “just because we’re using the waiver authority doesn’t mean we’ve not be mindful of our obligation to be stewards of the environment.”

No, of course not, that’s why the department to protect America is eager to stick metal, concrete and other obstructions in the midst of some of this country’s more endangered habitat in order to discourage all of those dry wallers, hotel cleaning ladies and landscapers from crossing over and working to make U.S. products and services cheaper for all of us hard-working Americans.

The Post story notes that “prized (and endangered) wildlife species are not respecters of international borders.” That’s just tough. One of the wildlife expert types called the belt of natural habitat along the Rio Grande in our neck of the woods as being one of national importance.

“The signficance of this (South Texas) area, biologically, is extraordinary,” said Evan Hirsche, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. Nor have the wildlife experts been impressed with the efforts of homeland security to build a nature-friendly fence, if there is such a thing.

“When you’ve got a wall 27 miles long and 16 feet high, that’s a tough one,” said Nancy Brown, a wildlife specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in The Post story. “Whether you’re an armadillo or an ocelot, when you bang into six miles of concrete wall, you’re in trouble.”

Sure enough, Nancy, but we need to protect America from excessive numbers of Mexicans. So, something has to give. Looks like the critters will have to take one for national security.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger Y Columnista

Here in the Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville specifically, considerable job growth in the sectors of public education, federal law enforcement, retailing and construction has only put a dent in the endemic poverty of a border region.

So who’s bitter, angry, and what should or could the goverment do about it?

The political distraction of the week came recently when a prominent left-leaning website, the Huffington Post, reported that Barack Obama said many people in the Rust Belt feel “bitter,” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” when economic fortunes in their communities and their lives turn sour.

Hillary Clinton became an instant born-again defender of all things God and guns when she and her campaign heard about Obama’s supposed gaffe. Hillary and her well-known spouse have earnings topping $100 million this decade, but that hardly stopped Clinton from morphing into blue collar Sally in saying Obama was out of touch with small town America. Hillary even downed some whisky and beer at an Indiana bar to prove her point.

Obama surely made, by his own admission, a clumsy explaination in trying to describe how Republicans have historically used religion, guns, and now immigration as wedge issues and tools of fear to sway working class Americans from voting for Democrats. We get that, but it was a no-win proposition for Obama to psychoanalyze blue-collar Pennsylvania, a place full of Archie Bunker Democrats who are going to have a hard time voting for a black guy for president.

I haven’t spent much time in the Rust Belt to know how angry or bitter Americans there are about a global economy and improving technologies and automation that have resulted in the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs. We’ve had our share of economic downturns as well, including a hollowing out of Brownsville’s economy throughout the  1980s when Mexico’s economy went to hell and took the city’s economic prosperity with it. And even after all of these years, it’s easy to recall the pain after the devastating Christmas Day freeze of 1983, which flattened this region’s economy and pushed unemployment above 20 percent.

I do believe there’s a basic difference in how our two parts of America view economic difficulties. The Rust Belt has a sense of entitlement about good jobs since they once had them, and enjoyed them for many a generation as $20-an-hour jobs at GM and Ford car plants were passed down as a birthright. In South Texas, we don’t have any such feelings of entitlement about jobs. We just hope there’s better ones in the years ahead because we’ve seen how little we used to have.

I saw some of that Rust Belt anger - and bitterness - about job losses in the late 1980s when Trico Technologies moved much of its manufacturing operations from Buffalo, N.Y., to Brownsville and Matamoros. The United Auto Workers sent a contingent, more like a mob, to this area to denounce the move and spout a series of ugly racial and ethnic stereotypes about the border. To hear them tell it back then, we all wear sombreros and take siestas under a palm tree at lunchtime. I guess that fell under the department of “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

We should pause here to thank Clinton and Obama for fighting that menacing free trade pact with Colombia, what with that nation’s economy making up 1/43 of our NAFTA-ravaged economy. Since they’re both mining for votes in the Rust Belt these days, the two Democratic presidential candidates are playing to the usual exaggerations and distortions about trade agreements. It’s Obama’s key wedge issue, (and one of Clinton’s as well), in trying to persuade the Archie Bunkers in Scranton that he can look out for their interests, too. 

Hey, it’s tough all over. Here in Brownsville, Tx., the poorest city of its size in America as defined by the Census Bureau, we can tell our own stories of woe and contrasts - job growth vs. enduring poverty, rising incomes vs. 42 percent of the local population living below this nation’s federally defined poverty level.

“Yes, there is an emerging middle class,” said Antonio Zavaletta, vice president for external affair at the University of Texas at Brownsville, in an interview with The Herald.  “(But) we’ve got so many people and we’ve grown so fast that the problems just multiply. As a community, we don’t break out.”

But we’re not bitter,  just resilient.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger.

A 41-year-old father of three, he owned two homes, some commercial property and ran and owned a successful heating and cooling business.

“I earned the respect of my clients,” said the immigrant, who put down roots in Chicago.

One big problem, though, this immigrant to America was here illegally. He didn’t cross a border. He didn’t climb over some ill-begotten border fence. His last name doesn’t fit the stereotype fashioned by the right-wing culture crowd on talk radio and cable television.

No, Andrezj Derezinski came to the U.S. in an entire legal manner 18 years ago. He stepped on American soil via a valid visa and passport. But Derezinski, or “Peter,” as he was called in the U.S., stayed in the country after his visa expired, becoming one of the nearly six million illegal immigrants who became undocumented in this manner. All told, up to 45 percent of the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are visa overstayers.

You don’t hear much about these sort of illegal immigrants from the right-wing culture crowd. CNN’s resident hatemonger, Lou Dobbs, doesn’t have any storylines with the words “Broken Visas,” headlining any of the reports on his slanted program. You won’t hear Fox News fathead Sean Hannity every push a guest on his show with questions like: “Mr. Homeland Security Secretary, when are we finally going to secure our leaky visa system?”

Nope. For the right-wing culture crowd it’s all about broken borders and securing the border, (the southern one, of course, nary a mention of the little country of Canada to our north), and so an illegal immigrant named Derezinski isn’t going to being demonized on CNN’s daily diatribe on broken borders. It doesn’t fit the script, the stereotype always being nurtured and pushed by the right-wing culture types who have assigned themsleves the task of protecting America’s sovereignty and purity from the Mexican hordes.

It would be informative for Dobbs, Hannity and their demagogic ilk to read the page 1 story in this past Thursday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. In a rare piece of reporting that goes beyond the usual media framework about how all illegal immigrants are Mexicans, the Journal story not only tells the story of Derezinski, the Polish illegal alien, but also details how many such immigrants fit his description.

Relatively few of the illegal aliens who are visa overstayers are from Latin American countries. The vast majority are from European countries, (i.e. Polish, British, French), and then followed by visa overstayers from the Phillippines, India, Korea, China and Vietnam. Gee, are they, too, crowding our public schools, using our medical and health care facilities, and all on food stamps, too, just like the Mexicans?

No, Derezinski, like the vast majority of Latin American immigrants here illegally, are hard-working, pay taxes, own property in many cases, and are raising American-born children. In Chicago alone, the Journal reports that there are about 70,000 Polish illegal immigrants, second only to the city’s undocumented Mexican population.

“Illegal immigration isn’t just a Latino issue,” said Frank Spula, president of the Polish-American Alliance, in the Journal article. “Polish people who overstayed their visas are here with family and property, and they just can’t pack up and leave.”

Gee, sound familiar? Sorry, Mr. Derezinski, what part of illegal don’t you understand?

And so, on April 10, the day the Journal story was published, Andrezj “Peter” Derezinski was deported back to Poland, leaving his American wife and three U.S.-born children behind. America, after all, can’t afford to have such hardened criminals in our midst.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

That’s what I gleaned from a cover story of the current issue of Fast Company, a trendy business magazine that reports on trends, technology, and changing marketplaces. A big headline that says, “The Brand Called Obama,” is played prominently on the magazine cover, as is a photo of the candidate looking off into the distance somewhere.

There’s a good amount of hero worship in the magazine article inside. When such adulation involves a politician, one should be careful about drinking too much of the Kool-Aid. Still, the article offers an insightful analysis on how the Obama campaign has skillfully tapped into the amazing and relatively new world of the Internet and all of its possibilities.

While the Clintons have largely clung to the usual political scripts, (i.e. depend on historically big donors, rely on mostly older establishment poiticians), the Obama campaign has tapped into a new age message machine of online clicks and Internet-based social networks. It is a machine that has not only worked to spread the candidate’s message and themes - but to also raise tens of millions of dollars a month from average wage-earning Americans.

While Hillary has been going to the usual fatcats of her party, Obama has gained hundreds of thousands of Internet-driven $50 donations from 18-to-34 Americans, many of whom had never given a contribution to a candidate before. Obama now regularly raises $30 million and more every month while Republican presidential candidate John McCain is lucky if he raises one-fifth of that amount while following traditional models of political fundraising.

“Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation,” the Fast Company article states. “Obama’s inclusive rhetoric is pitched to appeal to a Web generation of voters who want to be involved in creating messages and policies.”

Much, if not all of this, will surely sound like high-folluting nonsense to older voters, say a 40-something baby boomer like myself who struggles to get his mind around the richness of Internet intricacies and the online culture of instant messaging and social networking. But the kids get it and they’re moving fast, so fast that while skeptical boomers roll their eyes at Obama’s new age media machine, he has run right past the Clinton restoration,  with McCain now in his sights.

For all of Obama’s abilities as a candidate, his secret weapon might be a 24-year-old whiz kid named Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, a social networking engine that is hugely popular among young online users. Hughes took a leave from Facebook to become one of Obama’s chief gurus for all things online.  Fast Company says Hughes brought the Obama campaign “a mastery of the human side of social networking that has translated into real results.”

Millions of youthful Obama supporters have communicated amongst themselves about the campaign, the candidate, and in the process of all of their online social networking, generated enthusiasm, money and passion for the Obama campaign.

“This is where the Obama campaign has been strategic and smart,” says Andrew Rasiej, the founder of an online organization that studies how technology is changing politics. In the Fast Company article, Rasiej goes on to say, “They, (Obama campaign), have made sure the message machine was providing the message where people were already assembled. They’ve turned themselves into a media organization.”

This high-tech message machine will be the rubber that hits the road this fall against the McCain and the Republicans, if Obama does finally oust Clinton in the Democratic race. And then we will see if this new model of American political marketing and promotion will hold up against what is sure to be a full throttle Republican attack machine. A Boston Globe story this week reported that various Republican-leaning political groups are preparing “the book” on Obama, i.e. the return of the so-called “swift boat” line of attack advertising that helped to sink John Kerry in 2004.

It could be the battle of old-school swift boating vs. the new age social networking this fall, lining up not just a clash of ideas, but of political marketing and promotion that could decide a most interesting presidential race between a 46-year-old Democrat and a 72-year-old Republican.

Win or lose, Fast Company says the Obama Brand and the way it has run its Web-driven campaign has changed American politics, and is sure to generate a raft of imitators in the years ahead.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recognized the vital importance of this precious habitat along the Rio Grande, which is esentially about all that’s left of the native terrain that once made  up all of the Valley. At nearly 100,000 acres and running in a checkboard fashion along the river, this network of native lands is home to an array of endangered species that have moved back-and-forth across the river for ages - and long before anyone uttered the words, “illegal aliens.”

Great care and maintenance - along with significant amounts of federal dollars - have been invested into being good stewards of these endangered lands. American taxpayers, through their yearly contributions due by April 15, made the funding for purchase and maintenance of these lands possible. Now after all of this painstaking care and the expenditure of millions of federal dollars for this endeavor, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, is casting it all aside, saying, in effect, “never mind,” as he invokes special powers unwisely given to him by Congress to play the role of heavy-handed kingmaker.

Chertoff on Tuesday waived the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and other environmental protections to allow the the feds to finish building 700 miles of border fencing by year’s end. It is urgent, Chertoff claims, to put up the fence as soon as possible because, he says, Americans are clamoring for increased border security. It is debatable if such real urgency exists to keep out all of those dasterdely sheet rockers, farm workers and hotel cleaning ladies who do such great harm to America, but even if one one believes such a thing, shouldn’t the federal goverment respect its own laws?

We all accept that the border fence in some fashion is a done deal. But shouldn’t homeland security go through the legally mandated reviews of the consequences the fence will inflict? Perhaps that’s too much ask for a federal department agency that is all too eager to take legal action to confisicate the land of private property owners along the river for the vaunted fence, even when such lands have been in the hands of some American families for generations.

I’m not a squishy environmentalist nor do I count birdwatching as a hobby, but I respect both fields and endeavors, and even more so question the absolute need to run any fencing into the heart of carefully preserved natural areas. Can’t the feds run the thing around these areas, or pause long enough to carefully consider the best way to do it? Is it really essential to natural security to close the Sabal Palm Audubon Center after it will be rendered moot after Chertoff builds his fence through it? Is it really necessary to sqauander the millions of dollars in federal spending it took to buy 90,000 acres of land for the LRGV refuge by barreling fencing through much of it?

It is one thing for Chertoff to build his fence across the flat, federally owned desert of Arizona where no one cares if 20-foot fences go up to discourage Mexican immigrants who want to come into this country to clean hotel rooms, do landscaping, pick crops or build houses. It’s another to do the same to one of America’s more environmentally sensitive areas of native habitat along a river that divides two countries.

Litigation efforts to stop Chertoff from his plans to appease anti-immigration hardliners will likely fail, but Congress does  have oversight power to make this guy show that he has properly consulted local officials and landowners in construction of the fence. Legislation passed last December by the Congress ties funding of homeland security to Chertoff doing his job in providing detailed justification for each segment of the fence.

It looks like Chertoff sees all such requirements as hassles he doesn’t want to deal with - nor believes he is obligated to follow. Here’s a wish that Congress will remind Chertoff that he reports to the elected officials of  this country - and the people they represent - and not just his own wishes and ambitions.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger

That’s the word from  a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Yuma, Ariz., who says a 20-foot high, cement-filled steel-piped fence is getting the job done when it comes to reducing illegal immigrant apprehenisions in the southwest corner of Arizona.

“A lot of people have the misconception that it is a waste of time and money, but the numbers of apprehensions show that it works,” said agent Michael Bernacke, in a story published this week by the Christian Science Monitor.

That may be in what this agent sees in his small slice of the border, but not all in the law enforcement field are completely convinced about the effectiveness of a border fence within the scope and length of what is mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, a former U.S. Border Patrol sector chief in the Rio Grande Valley and his native West Texas, has a different take.

In a story published last year in Texas Monthly, Reyes said border fencing in small stretches in mostly urban areas could be effective, but said the vast stretches of fencing in isolated areas as prescribed by the 2006 law would prove to be costly and ineffective. When asked what he expected to hear in an upcoming Republican legislator-chaired hearing on border fencing, (a subject of the magazine story), Reyes said, “A bunch of bull.”

In Brownsville, a former high-level federal law enforcement officer who was also a police officer for many years, told me some border fencing could help in funneling criminal elements, (non-illegal immigrant types crossing to work), into areas where they could be apprehended, but otherwise took a cool view to the notion of miles and miles of such fencing.

“Twenty, 25 years from now, people are going to be clamoring to tear the thing down and asking, `What were people thinking back then when they had it built?’ ” he told me.

What the fence act envisioned was the sort of formidable fencing that divides Israel and the West Bank - and that has been constructed in the Yuma area. Triple and double-layered, and built in the desert and on federal land, the Arizona portion of the fence has seen few obstacles, either in geography or politics.

It’s a different story in South Texas. A meandering river, plenty of native brush, and hundreds of miles of privately owned land seperate the Rio Grande Valley and Mexico. It’s one thing to build fencing in desert land owned by the federal government and quite another to put up such structures on land that in some cases has been owned by the same families for generations.

On flat, hot desert land that is out-of-sight and out-of-mind except for the agents enforcing the law and the immigrants trying to get around them, residents in Yuma apparently give the thing little thought. In Brownsville, where a border fence is plotted out to cut into a university campus and block off the historical view between this city and neighboring Matamoros, this subject carries a completely different  meaning - and impact.

Of course, when politicians in Washington passed the fence law, after failing miserably to enact comprehensive immigration reform, they had no recognition or knowledge of the vast differences in geography, politics and history along the border - not that many of them would care. They don’t. Gaining such understandings is for sissies, apparently, so Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Tuesday that he planned to invoke legal waivers to go around various objections and environmental laws to get more of the fence built as quickly as possible.

Go ahead and put a finger in one stretch of the border, Mr. Secretary, and see something else come out on the other end. 

“For the Yuma sector, the numbers are telling,” said Ken Rosevear, president of the Yuma Chamber of Commerce in the Science Monitor article. “But we all know that once you shut down a pipeline in one area it merely diverts the traffic to somewhere else.”

That’s right. Going fishing? If so, better pack your passport if you’re a fisherman venturing off the shores of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. The Department of Homeland Security’s never ending war on terrorism now extends to keeping a more watchful eye on those ever dangerous sportsmen who enjoy fishing on Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes. You never know when one of those fishermen might be packing a weapon of mass destruction along with a tackle box of plastic lures.

I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. Page 1, the March 27 issue of USA Today, reports that beginning in April, Homeland Security will require U.S. citizens who enjoy the fishing life on Lake Erie to bring either a passport or two other IDs if they plan to cross the lake’s invisible watery border line with neighboring Canada. Then, when the fishermen get back to shore on the U.S. side, they will have to drive to a local governmental reporting station and pose for pictures, so Customs officers can get a look at them via videophone connection.

As Homeland Security Secretary, the always personable Michael Chertoff likes to say, they’re just there to enforce the law. They may not like the laws, but it’s not their job to like or dislike, be nice guys or mean guys, use common sense or no common sense. Their job, folks, is to enforce the law. Border security is border security, sorry, but you northern fishermen will have to adhere to the same sort of sillyness as us southerners who now need stepped-up security credentials just to cross over and have lunch in Matamoros.

“How does this secure our country?” asks Rick Ungar, a retired Ohio police chief and owner of a charter fishing service who takes sportsmen out over the waters of Lake Erie. “I’m not insensitive to law enforcement issues, but these are fishermen, for God’s sake.”

It’s interesting to read how folks in northern climes are chafing at dealing with the sort of hassles and federal law enforcement inspections that we southern border people have long dealt with. Do you think New Yorkers or Ohioans would enjoy sitting in long traffic lines at border check points everytime they wanted to drive into the interior U.S., and having to roll down their car windows while Sparky the German shephard looks at you suspiciously and his Border Patrol agent/handler asks the inevitable: “U.S. citizens?”

U.S. senators from places like Vermont are  now railing against excessive security regulations, (in wake of 9/11 and subsequent immigration hysteria from right-leaning Republicans), like southern border congressmen from Texas. Get use to it guys, and really, Chertoff and his guys are just doing their jobs.

In reference to keeping an eagle eye watch on those dangerous Great Lakes fishermen, here is what one of Chertoff’s flacks had to say in USA Today.

“Our concerns are anything from terrorists and terrorist weapons to drugs and undocumented aliens,” said one Brett Sturgeon, (isn’t that the name of a fish?), a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection.

Just to make sure all of those would-be terrorist fishermen get any ideas, CP&B will requring the following:

Fishing service operators along the Great Lakes will have to fax in passengers’ personal information, you know, name, DOB, government ID number to the local CP&B office an hour before they leave shore. Then, said fishermen/passengers will need to carry a passport or govt ID and a proof-of-citizenship document. And when they’re done, these would-be terrorists of leisure will need to troop down to a local border protection office so the feds can eyeball them via videophone.

“It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Jim Bonner, in the USA Today article. Bonner, who has run and owned a fishing charter business on Lake Erie for 25 years goes on to say, “It’s a shame. It’s just open water.”

Alas, open water, open lands, why, we can’t have open borders, Mr. Bonner, so if your fishermen drift over to Canadian waters, ni modo, as we southern border folk say, you have to deal with The Man, or maybe The Dog. We feel for our northern friends and fellow Americans. But if we’re going to have deal with a 20-foot metal pipe fence right behind the outfield fence at the UTB-TSC baseball field, the lest y’all can do is have your fishermen smile and say `hi’ to the feds via videophone. Maybe they can hold up their lines of fish and tell real fish stories.

It’s all part of securing our borders and being good `Mericans.

- Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger y Columinsta

Campos’ 9-year-old stepson, Andre, is shown wearing the sergeant’s military cap with the three bars signifying his rank in the U.S. Army. His right arm around his stepson and his left arm holding his wife, Jamie, Campos has a rueful smile, and for good reason.

At the airport, Jamie Campos said she lost her usual steely resolove to stay strong in seeing her husband leave yet again.

“I cried and I have never ever cried before,” Ms. Campos told The Times. “It was just really, really weird. He knew and I kind of knew. It felt different. We both knew it was the last goodbye.”

Sadly, that prediction came true. On June 1, 2007, Sgt. Campos died at a San Antonio hospital from injuries received while serving his country in Iraq. At this, the five year anniversary of the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, it’s a sad marker to note that the Rio Grande Valley has lost 28 of its sons to these wars, with the 28th coming just this week with the loss of Spc. Joe Rubio of Mission. Rubio’s was one of four soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Sunday, bringing the U.S. death toll in Iraq to an even 4,000.

Each name, every soldier, belonged to a family, had a story to tell, and many sent dispatches home of the fears and hopes they face daily in Iraq.

“I don’t know how much more of this place i (sic) can take,” Campos wrote to his wife in a Dec. 12, 2006 letter published in The Times.  “i try to be hard and brave for my guys but i dont know how long i can keep that up you know.”

Campos was part of the surge to Iraq that has been much reported and analyzed. The sergeant and his men were sent deep into insurgent neighborhoods, The Times reported, where they patrolled on foot, cleared houses, and mingled with Iraqis. Just yesterday, (Monday), President Bush said all those who have died in this war did not die in vain, and that their sacrifices will eventually help to build a lasting peace. Let’s hope so.

It’s clear from his letters that Sgt. Campos, one of our own, a young man from McAllen, always knew he was in danger, but pressed on in the traditions of the finest service given by young men and women to their country.

“The life of an infantryman is never safe..how do I know, well I live it every day,” Campos wrote in his MySpace blog, as published in The Times. “I for one would like to make it home to my family one day. Pray for us and keep us in your thoughts…for an infantryman’s life is never safe.”

For every analysis on whether the surge is working, or which military and political strategies should be taken, we should always remember there are real people behind the numbers. There are young men like Juan Campos, who wrote their last goodbyes.