I guess we will get fooled again

I shouldn’t feel guilty about asking for a few hundred bucks (and a few thousand over the next several months). I don’t (besides, I gave up guilt for Lent — in 1987 — and never took it back). This isn’t some high tech operation running a huge overhead… just phone bills and electricity (and keeping the duct taped Dell running). The expenses are real, and I’ll be happy to show anyone my bills… especially if they offer to pick up some of them.

Thanks to wreckingboy today, and those who’ve given previously. There’s still an urgent need to catch up the phone and electric bills, though.

I can’t guarantee my phone will still be on Monday at this point. I have $600 in overdue bills that need to be cleaned up and on-going expenses of 800 to 1000 a month from the Mex Files.

If you prefer to send a check, money order or make other arrangements, please write me at “richmx2 -AT- excite -DOT- com” and include “Mex Files” in the subject line.

The Great Texas Spy Cam Scam, in which the State asked for … ahem… pubic assistance (I guess it was a bad attempt to write bilingually… they wanted us to be pendejos) in catching illegal aliens crossing the border, was one of the stupider ideas ever to come out of what the late Molly Ivins called “the laboratory of bad ideas” .

Stupid, yeah. But then, we’ve got a governor who makes the previous fool look like a genius. This must have been too embarrasing idea for the Texas media. The only place I’ve seen it mentioned was El Universal:

Luis Carlos Cano/ Corresponsal
El Universal
Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua
Jueves 26 de julio de 2007

16:52 El gobernador de Texas, Rick Perry está gestionando recursos extras, a pesar de no tener la facultad de ley, para echar a andar un proyecto de colocar cámaras de vigilancia en la frontera.
La gestión la realiza después de que los legisladores estatales rechazaron su petición de cinco millones de dólares para poner en marcha el programa vecino vigilante cibernético, tendiente a que cualquier persona, desde cualquier lugar, monitoree la línea divisoria a través del Internet.

Katherine Cesinger, vocera del gobernador Perry, dijo que “todo es cuestión de contar con los fondos necesarios para el funcionamiento de las cámaras, sin operar desde el año pasado, ya que los congresistas declinaron fijar una cantidad monetaria en el presupuesto estatal de 153 mil millones de dólares para la adquisición de cientos de cámaras solicitadas por Perry para un sitio de Internet a efecto de que los cibernautas puedan patrullar virtualmente la zona fronteriza para detectar cualquier actividad ilícita”.

(Even if you don’t read Spanish, the only thing you need to figure out is a lot of money is being spent. In the test last year, the state spent a mere 20,000 dollars per “capture”… not including salary and overhead. Now the state wants 153 million dollars.