Stateside With Rosalea: All Over The Map

::My fellow Kiwis::

Bad parliament! Naughty parliament! To bed without any supper, parliament! I’d smack your collective botty if it wasn’t for that news crawl going across the bottom of my local early morning TV news in the middle of last week: New Zealand parliament passes child bashing law.

Well, to the best of my memory that’s what it said. It was very confusing. So I looked up on the Internet what actually was in the bill that got passed and was shocked to read in Sue Bradford’s speech that the new amendment is:

“encapsulating within the Bill the long-established police discretion regarding the action they take when deciding whether or not to prosecute in very minor cases where there is no public interest in proceeding.

“This new clause simply affirms in law what is standard police practice under their prosecution guidelines but I think it is useful in helping to calm some of the unnecessary fears driven up by the Bill's opponents.”

For my money, nothing that “affirms in law” something that is “standard practice” under police “prosecution guidelines” is simple. But then I’m one of those weirdoes who think there’s a reason the word “law” comes first in the phrase “law and order.” Just which of the Bill’s opponents were driving up those unnecessary fears, that’s what I’d like to know, and why.

Here’s why I worry about the amendment. That same afternoon, I couldn’t help but overhear the hilarity of a conversation taking place behind me in a coffee bar, where a guy was relating how, back in his native Mexico, a man whose wife took a lover shot the person who cuckolded him. When the police came, they decided—presumably according to their prosecutorial guidelines—that the act was inconsequential enough to require a meagre $100 bribe for it not to be reported as a murder.

::Zorro rules!::

“I want to move to Mexico!” said one of the other guys at the table in the coffee bar. Well, I guess that’s one way of reversing the immigration flow here in the United States: free murder and mayhem for all just south of the border.

Today’s Sunday talkshows were thick with comment on the sudden reemergence of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill of 2007 on Friday, and the haste with which the Senate wants to see it passed—by Monday evening. Opponents are calling the new Z visa amnesty plain and simple and have nicknamed it the Zorro visa.

The paranoid among us wonder if the haste is just to get the choice out there as soon as possible of either paying a $5000 fine and going back to Mexico for two years to qualify for the Z visa, or joining the armed forces and becoming a U.S. citizen after two years of service. Coupled with the troop surge and the Iraq funding bill, which will pass this week too, and the upcoming talks with Iran, a decidedly rotten stench is emanating from the Potomac swamplands at present.

::More whales on a mission::

Speaking of rivers, one thing you’ve got to say about wayward whales: They’ve got great timing. Remember how back in January 2006 when the World Climate Report was about to be released, that bottlenose whale swam up the Thames to make sure the British parliament took notice?

Well, this week a humpback whale and her calf swam from the Pacific to the inland port of Sacramento to make California legislators take notice of the International Whaling Commission meeting taking place in Alaska this month. Come on, Arnie... go down to the waterfront to say hello to them and offer their species some protection.

::By their mode of transport shall ye know them::

And while on the subject of our beloved governor, a rail enthusiasts’ forum I look at from time to time cited an op-ed piece Schwarzenegger wrote for a Central Valley newspaper, the Fresno Bee, as an example of his support for high-speed rail. Schwarzenegger begins by referring to the recent freeway bridge collapse in the Bay Area as an illustration of why “Californians need and deserve a diverse array of transportation options.”

That’s an interesting example to use—but then, he just picked up on what the newspaper’s earlier editorial had said. According to sources I interviewed back in 2005 for a story on high-speed rail, the biggest opponents of such a system in California—or anywhere else in the US for that matter—are the owners of the construction companies that make an exceedingly comfortable living paving the planet with freeways.

Perhaps among those opponents is the contractor who is lauded in the Bay Area’s local media as a hero for fixing the collapsed overpass in record time. Does C.C. Myers travel by road? No sirree, Bob! He flies everywhere. Are the steel girders he needs for the repairs coming in by road? Not on your Nellie—they’re arriving by train.

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