In her temporary injunction, Bolton delayed the most contentious provisions of the law, including a section that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws. She also barred enforcement of parts requiring immigrants to carry their papers and banned illegal immigrants from soliciting employment in public places — a move aimed at day laborers that congregate in large numbers in parking lots across Arizona. The judge also blocked officers from making warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants.

One of those states, naturally enough, is South Carolina. During the last legislative session, Sen. Larry Grooms sponsored a bill crafted on the Arizona legislation, and is looking to file a bill on the issue for next year.

“I’m not going to sponsor legislation that the court has said is unconstitutional,” he said. “But if we find out there legal problems with what Arizona has enacted, we’ll be able to work around it.”

Grooms said a test vote in the Senate on a budget provision that was similar to the Arizona law garnered more than two-thirds support, a sign that such a measure would pass the Legislature.

In a release Wednesday afternoon, Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell appeared absolutely committed to getting illegal immigration legislation passed, which means that it’s likely that it will be at the top of the list for the 2011 agenda. Considering the heat surrounding the issue nationally, it may define parts of next year’s session not devoted to another tough budget battle.

“We see today’s decision as only the first step in an important legal struggle,” McConnell said. “This ruling will not deter me from continuing to work on this issue. I am committed to continuing full steam to have a bill ready for the Senate and for us to pass a stronger Arizona style immigration bill when we return in January.”

If you ever took an Early Latin American History class in college (What, you didn’t? For shame.), you know that the current Southwest United States was settled by Native Americans first, and Latinos second. Then the white man came in and voilà, we get the Mexican War.

Dobbs’ strange fixation with illegal immigrants from Latin American countries, as time as gone on, has begun to border on the clinically paranoid. As in the classic “South Park” line, “They took our jerrrrrrbs.” Look fella, if you got a decent education, you wouldn’t be fighting Manuel for a $5.25 janitorial job, OK? Shit, man, you were born here. You had way, way more opportunity than that guy to move up the ladder and you pissed it away. That’s on you.

Immigration is as American as concussions in football and steroids in baseball. If your ancestors are mostly white, they came here of their own volition to make a better life. Same for most other ethnicities. If your ancestors are mostly black, they were brought over by force. If your ancestors are mostly Native American, they got royally fucked over. We’re sorry for that, but the government has other fish to fry.

Frankly, we don’t like illegal immigration any more than Tom Tancredo. But you’re not going to stop it by building walls — when have walls ever worked for anything? Never. Any wall can be overcome. Just ask the Germans, or the Chinese, or any number of dead medieval European guys. It would be great if everybody could be processed and come in a citizen. However, that’s not happening and anybody that says they have a quick and easy solution is lying to you.

Don’t tell that to Dobbsy, though, whose paranoia meter hit 11 recently when his house was hit by a bullet. He claimed, per the jokesters at Wonkette, “if anybody thinks that we’re not engaged in the battle for the soul of this country right now, you’re sorely mistaken.” The CNN talking head seems to believe that his house was hit as a threat, because of his regular, early evening polemics.

The police seem to have a different take on the matter.

Interviews with the New Jersey State Police yielded a rather different assessment of the events described by Dobbs. In a phone interview conducted yesterday, Sgt. Stephen Jones, a NJ State Police spokesperson, chuckled out loud after he heard about Dobbs’ account of the gunfire incident. Jones commented that he “wouldn’t classify it [the gunfire incident] as very unusual.” He also confirmed that there are hunters in the area, and stated that, “at this time of year hunter [shooting] complaints go up.”

He observed that in the ongoing police investigation sparked by Dobbs’ complaint, “nothing has been determined [regarding] what the intended target for this bullet was.” Nor did Jones confirm whether the shots near Dobbs’ house appeared to be an accident or intentional.

Another New Jersey State Police spokesperson, Sgt. Julian Castellanos, noted that “it’s a wide open area and there are hunters in the area.” Castellanos explained that the bullet had hit the house in vicinity of the attic; it “hit the vinyl siding and fell to the ground” without penetrating the vinyl, he said.

While Lou Dobbs’ wife, Debi Lee Segura, was standing outside the house at the time of the gunfire, the bullet did not come close to her; it “struck at the apex of the house, near the roof,” and thus considerably higher than a standing person, Jones observed.

[...]

When asked to comment for this story, Dobbs disputed the New Jersey State Police’s account, saying in an email that “there was no hunting season underway three weeks ago.” However, an official at the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife Bureau of Law Enforcement confirmed in a phone interview that state hunting seasons were underway at the time of the gunfire incident three weeks ago.

Oh, Dobbsy. You never fail to amuse.