Immigrant rights groups are disappointed in President Obama and Janet Napolitano for strengthening the 287(g) program, which gives local police and sheriffs authority to enforce immigration law. Critics charge that 287(g) enables self-selected racial profiling of anyone that looks or acts like an immigrant (wearing brown skin), and demean the practices as Crimmigration or Catch and Release.

Amy Goodman interviews two critics (video and transcript):

Our understanding, those of us who were watching Obama and had hopes in Obama, was that, under Obama, programs like 287(g) would be terminated, because they are driven off of a desire for racial profiling. Officers that want to be able to have the power to pick up Latinos, brown people, while driving, these are the self-selecting group of people that joined to 287(g). And unfortunately, two weeks ago, Napolitano gave us our first really blatant betrayal when she decided not only not to suspend 287(g), but to expand it around the country.

Notably, she gave this program--she reinitiated the contract with Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. Mind you, Joe Arpaio is currently under federal investigation. The Department of Justice, Eric Holder is investigating his use of the program. Meanwhile, Napolitano is going ahead and handing it off to him.

...

There was another anecdote last night about a guy in Morristown, actually a white guy who loves bachata music. He was saying that "I was driving in my convertible the other day, top down, listening to my bachata. The police stopped me." They don't even have 287(g) yet. "The police stopped me and said in Spanish, 'Give me your driver's license.' And they spoke worse Spanish than me, and I responded in Spanish, as a white guy, 'I don't even'--you know, I gave them the driver's license, responded in Spanish, and it was so clear that they assumed that I was Latino, because I don't have blue eyes, because I'm Italian American."

The Heritage Foundation supports strengthening of 287(g):

Section 287(g) Is the Right Answer for State and Local Immigration Enforcement

A §287(g) pilot program with the State of Flor­ida could serve as a national model. Florida spe­cifically limits its officers' civil immigration enforcement to situations in which they are part of a security or counterterrorism operation that is supervised by Immigration and Customs Enforce­ment (ICE) officers. The Florida program outlines the criteria for selecting the participating officers, including U.S. citizenship, three years of law enforcement experience, and at least an associate's degree. Selected officers receive intensive training and must pass a final competency exam. The pro­gram also establishes ways for people to file griev­ances against the program and its officers. The Florida initiative demonstrates how to craft a pro­gram that meets federal as well as state and local needs.

But researchers at the UNC School of Law Immigration and Human Rights Clinic echo the criticisms:

The team of law students, led by ... lawyers with the ACLU in North Carolina Legal Foundation, released a report on the 287(g) program in North Carolina titled The Policies and Politics of Local Immigration Enforcement Law on Feb. 18.

According to the report, one of the unexpected and problematic outcomes of the law is reluctance among immigrants to contact police if they are victims or witnesses of crimes because of the risk of being jailed or deported themselves. Additionally, there are growing concerns that law enforcement officers are targeting Hispanic-appearing individuals for minor traffic offenses.

...

After an extensive review of the program and data from partner organizations, the federal government, and community interviews, they have produced a 152-page report on the program detailing its weaknesses and proposing solutions, including greater transparency and a functional system for complaints or appeals.

When I was in high school, it was explained to me that there was no corresponding agency to the KGB in the United States. Perhaps combining the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, State Police and Coast Guard would be similar to the KGB, I was told. With some 500,000 persons, KGB combined foreign espionage, internal political espionage, surveillance of the armed forces, internal security, surveillance of foreigners and suspicious citizens, monitoring foreign communications (including code-breaking), protecting party members and their families and border security.

So now I see the US combining Homeland Security, Immigration and local police and sheriffs, and operating extensive prisons for citizens and aliens alike, and I wonder who won the cold war, ... or the last election.

... but to the technologically better-endowed:

High-Frequency Traders Say Speed Works for Everyone

"The key is a level playing field, but you should not lower the playing field to make it level," he said. "All you have to do is make sure everybody has the same level of access. I don't think there's anything wrong with high-speed trading per se if they have the same priority as any other investor."

As the strategies increased in speed, it became impossible for investors without advanced computer systems to get fair prices, according to some market participants. Firms handling large trades complained that brokers using complex algorithms fire off hundreds of orders and immediately cancel them in an effort to trick them into revealing plans to buy or sell.

"If you're trying to buy a big block of stock, the algorithms notice," said Bart Barnett, head of equity trading at Morgan Keegan & Co. in Memphis, Tennessee. "It increases volatility and has an adverse effect on the prices customers get on stocks."

Phelps Beaten by Biedermann at World Swimming Championships

Michael Phelps was beaten in the 200-meter freestyle final at the world swimming championships in Rome by a German in a new speedsuit that will be banned next year.

Paul Biedermann won in a world record time of 1 minute, 42 seconds, ahead of previous record-holder Phelps, who finished in 1:43.22. Danila Izotov of Russia came third in 1:43.90.

Biedermann came into the final as the fastest swimmer at this year's event, having broken Phelps' two-year-old championship record in the semifinals with a time of 1:43.65. The German -- wearing his Arena X-glide suit that's considered faster than Phelps' Speedo LZR Racer -- also broke Ian Thorpe's seven-year-old world record in the 400-meter freestyle on the first day of the championships.

"It shows I'm in great condition," Biedermann said. "And the suits really do have an effect."

In a related vein, new TPM poster Busby Birdwell anticipates that his new vote harvesting bot will propel all his posts to the top of the recommended list.

I have to admit that I had forgotten about the Associated Press's dislike of being quoted in blogs, but several blog posts led me to this NY Times reminder:

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.'s president and chief executive, said the company's position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

But the Moderate Voice reminds us that AP could easily have opted out of search engines.:

For more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air thinks AP is only isolating themselves:

Besides, the AP doesn't get to determine what "fair use" means; Congress does. It has been a long-accepted practice for commentators to use small excerpts from articles in order to both report the news and to comment on its delivery. This goes back decades, when reviewers excerpted novels and media critics excerpted each other to deliver critiques. Just because the AP doesn't like copyright law doesn't mean it doesn't still applies to them. However, the threat of legal action and the cost to people working on small revenue streams will mean that their threats will mostly be effective.

I get most of my news through the internet, which costs perhaps about the same as I used to spend every month on newspapers and magazines. I used to subscribe to a lot of magazines. I feel bad that AP and the traditional media haven't found a payment system that works, but at the same time, I recognize that my internet experience of news and opinion is vastly superior to the MSM presentation of what they think is news.

I learn far more from TPM than from MTP, and enjoy it to boot.

Update: I heard NPR's On the Media today - an article called Copyright Flack in which a copyright lawyer was complaining about aggregated news websites. He wants to change the copyright law to prevent infringement claiming that links would not be affected, but I frankly didn't believe the rule change would be as benign as he claimed..