If local police enforce immigration law, con artists, rapists, and murderers can target illegal immigrants with impunity, because their victims will be scared to go to the police. This is obvious to anyone who thinks about it at all.

That you get instances like Sheriff Tommy Thompson of Harris County pledging to get his deputies trained in immigration law (via Kuff) simply means that the people involved have decided that illegal immigrants are sufficiently immoral that they deserve anything that happens to them. This is the same ethical system that justifies torturing random Arabs because they're bad people. (How can you tell they're bad? They confessed under torture!)

It's a popular ethical system, and it is completely wrong. The notion that a bad person deserves anything that happens to them is antithetical to any concept of fair justice, antithetical to the rule of law, and antithetical to Christian morality, as well as the ethical systems of all the world's other major religions and philosophies.

It is popular because it's simple: Bad things should happen to bad people! But that is immature and naive, the ethical analysis of a child who has considered only the core of his idea. It takes something more like experience and wisdom to consider the edge cases. Very bad things shouldn't happen to slightly bad people! Things that are bad in one way shouldn't happen to people who are only bad in another way. And so on.

Again, the people like Sheriff Tommy Thompson have decided that those cases just don't matter. They think it's fair that only some people are protected from crime.

Fifty years ago, the same thinking, that only some people were worth protecting, led to sundown towns. Ten years from now, perhaps only the people living in walled enclaves will be worth protecting.

As it happens, Sheriff Tommy Thompson is up for election this year. Adrian Garcia would like to replace him. I think it'd be a good idea.

Only one filly before today had come in 2nd at the Kentucky Derby (only three had won). Eight Belles finished a strong second today.

As she was slowing after the race, her jockey heard the sound every horseman fears, the sound of a condylar fracture, a break in the horse's cannon bone. Seconds later, the same bone in her now overburdened other front leg also broke.

She was euthanized on the track seven minutes after crossing the finish line.