Editorial: New deportation plan is a win-win

The unnamed Courier editor is all for the Accidental Governor's new plan to simply take the illegals out of our jails and give them to the Feds for deportation. What he doesn't ask is how we failed to think of this before.

So I took a look. The Daily Sun and other actual news outlets report that, surprise, this is nothing new. We've been doing it since 2005, azzamannerperfack, and

About 200 criminal immigrants are released early from prison in Arizona each month and turned over to federal authorities. Eighty percent of those are immediately deported to Mexico, while the rest are sent to federal detention centers, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Admitting that ol' Janet was actually doing this for years before new Jan announced it as a big budget savings might be inconvenient to the Republican memory hole, of course. But

Under a previously approved program Brewer now wants implemented, about 1,300 prisoners would be turned over to ICE in the coming 18 months, saving the state about $5.7 million.

Hang on, check those numbers. We've been handing over 200 prisoners a month, and the Governor wants to up that to 1,300 in 18 months? I smell an arithmetic fail, if nothing else.

But cutting the budget is really really important, right? Even if by a measly six million clams that apparently the system has already been saving for four years.

If this little dance is enough to fascinate the editor, it's no wonder he can't figure out what Steve Norwood is doing.