Solution to Illegal Immigration: Shooting 'Em!

Recently, a right-wing radio station in Arizona had his own ideas of how to deal with illegal immigrants and he definitely expressed them:

‘What we'll do is randomly pick one night every week where we will kill whoever crosses the border,'' James said in the March 8 broadcast. ‘‘Step over there and you die. You get to decide whether it's your lucky night or not. I think that would be more fun.'', adding he would be ‘‘happy to sit there with my high-powered rifle and my night scope'' and kill people as they cross the border.
He also suggested that the National Guard shoot illegal immigrants and receive ‘‘$100 a head.''

As you can guess this soon caused great controversy. To the point that the spokesman for the group had to make a statement saying that"these comments have no place on our airwaves." As for James, he did issue a disclaimer: "KFYI does not advocate shooting illegals. It might be fun, but they don't advocate it."

You may think this was just the problem of one single host ‘slightly’ going overboard. But it is worth noticing that the program manager at the radio station Laurie Cantillo acutally denied that James's comments were dangerous or irresponsible.

‘The comments were made in a satirical manner and the listeners who heard the full broadcast understand that,'' she said. ‘‘We were having a serious discussion about the immigration issue and it was solution-driven.''

Solution-driven? What solution? Shootin'em? Some satire indeed!

Well, to understand what is at stake here, we should probably take a closer look at redio station KFYI:

KFYI is owned by Clear Channel Communications (a corporation which 1200 stations nationwide and has a highly controversial right-wing ideology – read our post on them from last year).

Among other recent controversies regadring Clear Channel Communications:
- They organized and paid for a counterpoint to anti-war demonstrations,
- They banned the Dixie Chicks for critizing the war in a magazine,
- They have censored opinions critical of George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Not surprisingly, as we mentioned before, the founder and chairman of C.C.C., is Lowry Mays, a staunch Republican Texan and one-time George W. Bush business associate.

Thankfully, we can also add Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard and U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton sent a complaint to the FCC, in which they stated:

This type of threatening and inciting speech is dangerous and totally irresponsible for anyone, particularly a licensed body using public airways.

Somebody is making sense after all.