{"id":2314,"date":"2009-05-21T11:54:36","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T18:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=2314"},"modified":"2009-05-21T11:54:36","modified_gmt":"2009-05-21T18:54:36","slug":"dear-my-senator-not-in-my-back-yard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2009\/05\/21\/dear-my-senator-not-in-my-back-yard\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear My Senator, Not In My Back Yard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A letter<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dear My Senator,<br \/>\nThank you very much for being one of the 90 senators who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.senate.gov\/legislative\/LIS\/roll_call_lists\/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&amp;session=1&amp;vote=00196\">voted<\/a> for Amendment 1133  to H.R. 2346.  I have long felt, as I&#8217;m sure you do, that keeping terrorists out of my own backyard is of vital importance to the security of our Great nation (not to mention to the security of my dog, who also uses my backyard.  And I say this even though my backyard has lots of weeds and I could use some help cleaning it up.)  It is, I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll agree, completely and totally wrong to attempt to deal with these people by giving them the same sort of justice that we Americans enjoy.  (As a side note, I was shocked to recently learn that our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ushistory.org\/declaration\/document\/index.htm\">Declaration of Independence<\/a> includes the lines &#8220;We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness&#8221; without any reference to these men being American.  Is there anyway you could pass an amendment fixing this unfortunately hole?  Maybe you can just sneak in and cross out &#8220;all&#8221; and replace it with &#8220;American?&#8221;  Does your handwriting look like Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s handwriting?)  Further I have seen a prison on television, and was amazed at how easy it is to break out of those places (all you have to do is cover the hole you dig with pictures of pin-up gals and crawl throw sewer pipes.)  Finally, and one of the main points for I support your vote, is that I recently learned that part of the notion of justice is that if someone is not convicted then they are considered not guilty.  I did not know the system worked this way: it was my understanding that if you were detained then this detention was the so-called &#8220;trial.&#8221;  And by the manly stand put forth in your vote, you have assured us all that the people for which not enough evidence exists to convict the people will not end up in my backyard.  Thank you.<br \/>\nBut back to the point of this letter.  In thinking about your recent vote, it occurred to me that I would like to see it go further.  For example, why do we currently imprison people in our own home state?  Our home state is, you know, very close to my backyard, and letting dangerous murders, sex offenders, and white collar criminals be imprisoned near my backyard seems, well, dangerous.   Can&#8217;t we figure out some way to ship them to another state?  I have heard California and Texas have a lot of prisons.  But maybe even shipping them to another state isn&#8217;t enough.  Maybe we should buy Cuba and turn it into a place where we can put all prisoners?  This will allow us to sell the whole thing as a tropical communist <a href=\"http:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/dc\/inhofe-free-colonoscopies-at-gitmo\">vacation resort<\/a>, just in case those socialist liberals complain.  Even cheaper, it occurs to me that we can send them all to Canada.<br \/>\nThank you very much for reading my letter and taking up consideration of this very patriotic cause.  I look forward to supporting you in your efforts to produce a society in which my backyard is safe and secure.<br \/>\nYour friend,<br \/>\nDude\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b> No sooner do I post this wonderful letter than some guy calling himself the president (is he even a citizen?  I thought he was born in Atlantis) <a href=\"https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?URI=www-nc.nytimes.com\/2009\/05\/22\/us\/politics\/22obama.html&amp;REFUSE_COOKIE_ERROR=SHOW_ERROR\">weighs in on this matter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A letter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}