Quibble?

[bobquasit]

This may be a minor point, but isn't "catch and release" a term that's normally applied to animals?

I'd never heard it applied to humans before the recent immigration speech by El Presidente Busho. Had anyone else heard it used that way before then?

And on an unrelated note, I'm SO glad that George W. was able to have a lot of fun riding a dune buggy around in the desert. I'd enjoy watching him a lot more (perhaps even as much as his giggling followers in the press corps) if I didn't also have the mental image of American soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians dying on the sand, sans dune buggy.

Comments

[tprjones.livejournal.com]

I've heard it before from other sources. I did a quick check, and found an article on CIS from back in September 2002 (http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1002.html) that uses the phrase.

[moonlitmagik.livejournal.com]

never heard it either..

[klyfix.livejournal.com]

I think I have heard it before, and probably at least once in relation to immigration. It certainly is a reality that people who get caught crossing the border illegally and who get sent back to Mexico are probably just going to try again, so it's not that inaccurate an analogy.

Weird Goofy Tangent Time: Ya know, if we'd annexed the whole of Mexico during the Mexican War we'd not have this problem, at least not with Mexicans. :) I think there actually was some desire then and after to add Latin American territory to the US; folk called "Fillibusters" attempted to take over parts of Mexico or small Latin American countries in order to make them part of the US. This, oddly enough, I learned about in a GURPS Alternate Earths source book; in the "Dixie" timeline William Walker was successful in some of his endeavors and used his rulership of Nicaragua to support the South, helping them to win the Civil War (the British supporting the South was a factor also). A fair chunk of Latin America ends up as part of the Confederate States, which becomes a major world power, while a big chunk of Canada ends up joined with the North. I suspect that the SJG people needed to augment the Confederacy in that way to make it an interesting timeline; I suspect that if the South had simply attained independence they'd have been in economic collapse by the beginning of the20th Century even if they took the slave states who stayed in the Union and some of the territories with them. The Southern slave plantation economy was highly flawed for long term survival, and add that there would likely be boycotts of Southern cotton and other products from the Europeans who would have other sources and they have a problem. Plus the difficulty that the Confederacy was, well, a confederation and the States were supreme.

Still, I wonder if there are Alternate History stories featuring a US that annexed the whole of Mexico. Would make for a wildly different timeline, considering that there would be an addition of a whole lot of Catholic non-Northern Europeans to the American citizenry.