Earlier today, Drudge headlined an ABC News story about how many millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on stimulus signs. Not stimulus projects, but just the signs to let everyone know where their money is being spent, whether it needed to be or not. I haven’t been able to find how many jobs have been “saved or created” merely by putting up signs saying the government is saving or creating jobs, but I’m sure the number is substantial.

Some are calling this a political move (duh) — that placing more and more of these signs in an election year will help the Democrats who helped pass the Recovery Act. I heard one person say, “They’re basically big yard signs for Democrats up for re-election.”

Are they?

One morning, as I sat still amid a throng of idling cars occupied by frustrated drivers on the verge of road-rage, I looked down the road a bit, and proudly displayed in full view in front of a construction site where nobody was working on a 65-degree sunny morning was a sign just like this one:

From a political sales perspective, I’m not sure it’s going to help Democrats at all — it could have the reverse effect. Putting up all these signs could be the biggest mistake the Obama administration has made so far — and that’s saying something. There’s nothing worse for a politician than to put a sign up to remind everybody exactly who it was that caused them to be late for work and ticked off that morning. Especially in an area that nobody’s been working in for quite some time and wasn’t in disrepair in the first place, as was the highway I was driving on at the time.

Even if you’ve never been in a stimulus-induced traffic jam, there have been enough Porkulus horror stories out there for long enough that it should make any sane politician, if there are any, very hesitant to take credit for them.

Obama putting up “Recovery Act” signs that are synonymous with his administration in full view of the accompanying traffic jams combined with the tales of waste we’ve read about for a long time has all the sales impact of placing Alpo billboards in front of pet cemeteries if you ask this voter.

Road work is a necessary inconvenience (well, often it is anyway), but taking credit for extreme traffic backups is just plain stupid — which is why traffic jams have never been “sponsored” before, and probably never will be again when or if the geniuses behind Hope, Change, Gumdrops, Rainbows and Unicorns figure this out.

In other words, when we look at a stimulus sign, the president wants us to see a positive symbol of progress, like this:

And what we’re really seeing is this:

**Written by guest-blogger Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

From a transcript via Drudge:

KING: Where — was — did sex occur in their house?

LEVI JOHNSTON, EX-FIANCE OF BRISTOL PALIN, FATHER OF BRISTOL’S SON, TRIPP: You know, Larry, that I’m a gentleman, you know. And I don’t, you know, kiss and tell. So, you know, I don’t think that really — that really matters. I mean…

KING: And how about the part, though, that — well, first you said you practiced safe sex most of the time, right?

L. JOHNSTON: Right.

KING: Most of the time.

“On an Arctic Cat? In an igloo? Could you see Russia while you were doing it? In the back of a helicopter while Bristol’s mom shot wolves?”

I sure am glad Larry’s desk covers him from the waist down.

A video of the old perv in action is here.

Reader Steve J. e-mails: “I’m glad the LA School District is so pro-First Amendment. Will the District also be supporting the First Amendment by providing bus transportation so students can go to their house of worship of choice for the National Day of Prayer?”

Update: The downside you won’t see today…MS-13 convictions…U.S. charges 22 in alleged fraudulent identification ring based in Chicago; Cell leader allegedly ordered murders of competitors in Mexico…Border: The Movie…

Update: Check out “You Don’t Speak for Me” for a diverse perspective on illegal immigration.

Update: Have you read about Hillary’s radical La Raza adviser?

Update: Here come the reconquista shirts!

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Let’s start off today’s May Day illegal alien rally day with some misleading immigration numbers:

The Drudge Report trumpeted the NYTimes spin by headlining this stat:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, facing intense political pressure to toughen enforcement, removed 221,664 illegal immigrants from the country over the last year, an increase of more than 37,000 — about 20 percent — over the year before, according to the agency’s tally.

221,664.

It sounds like we’re getting serious about immigration enforcement–until I remind you of this inconvenient truth that will get glossed over in all the MSM sob stories today:

U.S. Can’t Account for 600,000 Fugitives
March 26, 2007

Teams assigned to make sure foreigners ordered out of the United States actually leave have a backlog of more than 600,000 cases and can’t accurately account for the fugitives’ whereabouts, the government reported Monday.

The report by the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that the effectiveness of teams assigned to find the fugitives was hampered by “insufficient detention capacity, limitations of an immigration database and inadequate working space.”

Even though more than $204 million was allocated for 52 fugitive operations teams since 2003, a backlog of 623,292 cases existed as of August of 2006, the report said.

The number of illegal immigrants in the United States has been estimated at between 11.5 million and 12 million. About 5.4 percent of them are believed to be “fugitive aliens,” those who have failed to leave the country after being ordered out.

The inspector general found there is not enough bed space available to detain such fugitives and that agents are hampered by an inaccurate database. Other factors that limit the teams’ effectiveness are insufficient staffing, the report said.

Until the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, attempts to catch such fugitives were mostly carried out by teams not exclusively devoted to the task. After the attacks, an Absconder Apprehension Initiative was created within the Justice Department to find, apprehend and deport such immigrants. When the Homeland Security Department was created in March 2003, it assumed responsibility.

Plans for the new office stated that it aimed to eliminate the case backlog by the end of 2012, although a field manual put the timetable at 2009, the report said.

Yet “despite the efforts of the teams, the backlog of fugitive alien cases has increased each fiscal year since the program was established in February 2002,” the inspector general said.

221,664 “removed” illegal aliens vs 623,292 released illegal alien fugitives.

That’s right, people.

There are nearly three times as many officially designated illegal alien fugitives freed by the feds as there are illegal aliens who have been removed over the last year.

Just doing the context-setting and number-crunching the rest of the MSM won’t do…

***

Guess what else? More and more of the illegal aliens caught by immigration authorities and ordered to appear for deportation hearings are skipping out. From the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General:

As the IG explains:

Each year, thousands of illegal aliens fail to respond to orders to appear at their scheduled immigration hearing. In most of these cases, the Immigration Judge (IJ) will conduct an in absentia (in the absence of) hearing and order the alien removed from the U.S. However, a failure to appear does not always result in an in absentia order. In 4 percent of the cases the IJ may also administratively close a failure to appear case without ordering the alien removed. Of the 461,556-immigration judge decisions and administrative closures issued by the Executive Office of Immigration and Review (EOIR) between FY 2001 and FY 2004, 39 percent (181,807) were issued to illegal aliens who had been released but later failed to appear at their respective immigration hearings.

Although the percentage of released aliens who failed to appear at their respective hearings has declined in recent years, the total number of aliens failing to appear is increasing.

During FY 2001, 42,030 aliens failed to appear compared to 52,890 who failed to appear during FY 2004, a 26 percent increase.

In fact, according to DHS’s Detention and Removal Office, 85 percent of the illegal aliens released that have been issued final orders of removal, will abscond. That goes not just for illegal aliens from Mexico, but for illegal aliens from terror-friendly and terror-sponsoring nations:

Illegal Aliens from Special Interest Countries (SIC) and State Sponsors of Terrorism (SST) Countries. A significant number of OTMs that are apprehended and released each year originate from SIC and SST. From FY 2001 through the first half of FY 2005, 91,516 SIC and SST aliens were apprehended of which 45,000 (49%) were later released. It is not known exactly how many of these SIC and SST aliens were ultimately issued final orders of removal and were actually removed since such data is not tracked by DRO. However, assuming SIC and SST aliens are being removed at the same rate as other apprehended and released aliens, 85 percent of the SIC and SST aliens released who eventually receive final orders of removal will abscond.

One more updated graph for you from the immigration court bureaucracy shows that failure to appear rates rose again in 2005 and held steady through 2006:

And there’s this truly frightening reality:

[The Detention and Removal Office] estimates that in FY 2007 there will be 605,000 foreign-born individuals admitted to state correctional facilities and local jails during the year for committing crimes in the U.S. Of this number, DRO estimates half (302,500) will be removable aliens.

Currently, most of these incarcerated aliens are being released into the U.S. at the conclusion of their respective sentences due to the lack of DRO resources.

Homeland security? What homeland security?

Well, I see the news about the pre-State of the Union immigration raids–intended to soften up conservative opposition to the coming illegal alien amnesty–is getting big play. Misleading play.

The top-left corner headline this morning at Drudge reads “Officials catch 761 illegals in Los Angeles.”

But click through to the LA Daily News story and you’ll find out–as I noted yesterday–that of the 761 “caught,” 423 were already in jail when they were supposedly “swept” off the streets:

Between 75 and 150 officers participated in the raids. Los Angeles County logged 169 arrests, the most of any county, Hayes said. He said 338 illegal immigrants were arrested primarily at their homes and apartments. The other 423 were identified in area jails since Jan. 17 and were expected to be deported after serving their sentences.

So, they finally got around to asking criminals in the jails what their immigration status is. And then they turned around and announced they had “caught” those 423 illegal aliens in order to bill the raids as among the “largest ever.”

Another politically-timed enforcement gesture.

And now we inch closer to the coming amnesty disaster.

The state of the borders, green card process and entrance system for visitors and tourists? Porous. Chaotic. Understaffed. And overwhelmed.

But no matter. Mouthing his same old, bogus platitudes about the need to allow “undocumented workers” to do the job Americans won’t do (never mind all those Americans who immediately lined up to apply for those meatpacking jobs after the December raids), Bush wants to pile millions of new “guest worker” illegal alien applicants onto the teetering homeland security bureaucracy.

The results will be disastrous. What President Bush didn’t mention in the State of the Union address is that every part of the current legal immigrant applicant machinery that would be tasked with implementing the “guest worker” illegal alien amnesty is backlogged and broken.

Last November, congressional investigators reported that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency’s busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 citizenship applications last year without the required files. Poof! I have heard first-hand from adjudicators in Texas and southern California who have piles of files in backrooms that have yet to be read. The application backlog remains in the millions. Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, called for a Government Accountability Office review that uncovered at least one case in which an applicant with ties to the terrorist group Hezbollah was granted citizenship without a check of his primary file.

“It only takes one missing file of somebody with links to a terrorist organization to become an American citizen,” Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, noted in The Washington Post. “We can’t afford to be handing out citizenship with blinders on.”

Or legal status. Multiply that by several million in the case of Bush’s guest worker program. Can you spell d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r?

The FBI’s background check backlog for legal immigrant applicants stands at a reported 100,000 files, which have been waiting for action for a year or longer. At least they didn’t shred them all (uh, as far as we know) — which is what federal contractors did at the immigration center in Laguna Niguel, Calif., over the last several years. To rid itself of a 90,000-document backlog, supervisors ordered workers to destroy passports, birth certificates, approval notices, change of address forms, diplomas and money orders. Then they reported that they had reduced the backlog to zero. Poof!

Michael Cutler, a veteran of the immigration bureaucracy who worked as a senior special agent at the former INS, says working at the agency is like the comedy scene out of “I Love Lucy” where Ethel and Lucy — overwhelmed at a candy factory by an out-of-control conveyor belt — try eating the candy bars and stuffing them down their dresses to stay on top of the flood:

“The situation is reminiscent of what happens to beleaguered adjudicators at the USCIS every day, and it is not the least bit funny. The adjudicators cannot eat the applications, nor can they stuff them down their clothes. In order to get good evaluations, they need to move these applications as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do this is to approve them. Needless to say, this means that fraud-laden applications are often not detected and aliens receive a wide variety of benefits, including United States citizenship to which they would not be entitled if the relevant facts were known. As more aliens get away with committing fraud, the ‘word’ spreads through the communities and more aliens are emboldened to commit fraud, further eroding any integrity that might have still remained in the process. To make things worse, when an application is denied, the alien is virtually assured that no special agent will be looking for him to seek his removal from the United States.”

We are incapable of imposing order and handling the current crush of legal immigrant applicants in a fair and timely way. You want “comprehensive immigration reform”? Start with border control, reliable adjudications, consistent interior enforcement, and efficient and effective deportation policies. And don’t pretend that piling on is going to fix a damned thing.

I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger’s scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page’s name and identity. Seizing on ABC News’ redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man’s privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.

Nobody is acting well here. ABC News seems to have made an honest error when it failed to completely redact the young man’s AOL IM handle. That’s how the conservative blogger traced the exposed man’s identity. But in the wake of the Drudge pounding tonight, the news network surreptitiously edited its misreporting on the young man’s age at the time of one of the IM exchanges without bothering to make clear it was a correction.

Originally, ABC News had reported:

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys under the age of 18.

It appears that after the Drudge headline went up, ABC News changed the wording without acknowledging the change:

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys who began their exchanges with Foley at the age of 16 and 17, and continued through the age of 18.

That’s bad journalism. ABC News should explicitly acknowledge its error.

That said, some on my side of the political aisle are so bent on shooting the messenger that they have tossed their scruples and good judgement to the wind. Over a prolonged period with who knows how many pages and former pages, Foley abused his power. Not vice versa. ABC News says the other recipient of the explicit IMs it has obtained began receiving them at 16, and also reports that it has logs dating back 5 years. Who knows how many more were contacted and at what ages?

Drudge–who has railed on his radio show against Foley’s prey as “beasts” who were “egging” Foley on–characterizes the exposed man as Foley’s “accuser.” But the young man was not the source for ABC News, according to the Wall Street Journal’s previous reporting. Look:

Two former pages — one who had been sponsored by a Republican member of Congress and one by a Democrat — offered ABC texts of sexually explicit instant messages purportedly sent by Mr. Foley. Mr. Ross said the network then tracked down the original recipients of those messages, using a page yearbook, and got firsthand confirmation of their authenticity. Mr. Ross said he thinks one of the original recipients was a Democrat and the other a Republican.

The right thing for the conservative outing mob to have done would have been to halt the gotcha locomotive and make a good-faith effort to ask the young man if he was Brian Ross’s primary source or “accuser.” But nobody gave him a chance to verify that before his name was dragged out into the open.

Also lost in the feeding frenzy is the plain, indelible fact that Foley initiated his sexually explicit contacts with the exposed young man when he was a minor. Read:

The fact that Foley continued his contact with the exposed young man after he turned 18 does not mitigate his original predatory behavior before.

This young man’s name is now one of Technorati’s top search terms thanks to the conservative outing mob. Are you proud of sinking to the level of the liberal witch hunters? Shall we all shrug our shoulders now and accept the inevitability of turning into our own worst enemies?

***

Meanwhile, there’s this mess via Fox News:

House GOP leaders on Tuesday asked for an investigation into an allegation that former Rep. Mark Foley showed up drunk outside the House page dorm near the nation’s capitol, FOX News confirmed.

The allegation first arose during a members-only Republican conference call Monday. Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said he had heard a rumor about Foley’s alleged drunken visit to the page dorm, which is located behind the Cannon House Office Building, one block south of the Capitol.

FOX News has also learned that House Majority Leader John Boehner advised Wicker not to discuss the rumor in detail on the call but to refer the matter more privately to House leadership.

According to a GOP source, Boehner sought to avoid the Wicker story from being leaked to the media. Boehner’s called that characterization “completely false” and said Boehner only sought to have Wicker work the rumors through formal leadership channels, not on a party-wide conference call.

Yesterday, Boehner sent a letter to the Clerk of the House, Karen Hass, seeking an investigation. He did not release the letter publicly until late Wednesday.

The letter read in part: “it has been brought to my attention that an alleged incident may have occurred in years past involving former Representative Foley. Specifically, it has been alleged that he may have been seen intoxicated at night outside the U.S. House of Representatives Page Dormitory, possibly attempting to gain entry to the building.”

Boehner’s letter went on to say “As you are the current Clerk of the House and Officer in charge of the Page Program, I am requesting any and all information your office has regarding this alleged incident and the involvement of the Office of the Clerk at that time and henceforth.”

It is unknown when the episode occurred.

However, Rep. Deborah Pryce of Ohio, chairman of the House Republican Conference, sent a letter to Hass saying that U.S. Capitol Police officers stopped Foley from entering the page dorm “within the last several years.”

Pryce also said on the same Monday GOP, members-only conference call, lawmakers said that the Director of the Republican Pages “brought specific concerns about then-Congressman Foley’s behavior to the attention of the then-Clerk of the House.”

This deserves the screaming headline.

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Bryan Preston does more air-clearing. Read the whole thing.