I mean after all, just because they are charged with drug offenses doesn't mean that they shoud be kicked out of the country, does it -- even if they entered illegally?

The Denver district attorney's office under gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter approved plea bargains that prevented the deportation of illegal and legal immigrants charged with drug, assault and other crimes.

The office allowed defendants to plead guilty to trespassing on agricultural land instead of the crimes they actually were accused of 152 times from 1998 through 2004. Other counties - Jefferson, Adams and Arapahoe - had only 75 convictions combined for the crime, according to court records.

Former Denver District Attorney Norm Early, who was Ritter's predecessor, laughed when he heard about the farm charges in urban Denver.

"I reviewed all my case dispositions, and I never remember that coming up," he said.

A review of 15 of the agricultural trespass cases in Denver showed that heroin and cocaine charges, theft of motor vehicles and domestic violence crimes - miles away from any farm or open land - were transformed into agricultural trespass.

"This plea agreement was reached with the the specific purpose of not pleading guilty to an offense that would subject (the defendant) to deportation proceedings," wrote a defense attorney in a motion filed in a Denver court Oct. 11, 2000.

The defendant, Ernesto Leon Reyes, was a resident alien who was initially charged with five drug counts related to his possession and intention to distribute 2,000 grams of methamphetamine.

If convicted of the drug charge, Reyes could have been deported after serving time. Instead, after pleading guilty to the trespass on agricultural land charge, Reyes received probation and stayed in the United States.

Did you folks get that one -- drug dealers remained in this country because the DA's office didn't want to subject them to the "hardship" of going back where they came from. Sounds like prosecutorial malfeasance to me.

And now Bill Ritter and the Democrats want him to be Governor of Colorado.

Vote Republican in Colorado and the rest of the country for every office -- public safety and America's borders depend on it.

There was clearly no merit to this suit -- the law is clear that illegal immigrant parents of American citizens have no right to stay in this country simply because they managed to breed while breaking this country's laws. And there is no legitimate counstitutional claim here, either.

A federal judge struck a blow Friday to the hopes of an immigration activist who has taken refuge in a Chicago church to avoid deportation, dismissing her lawsuit against the government.

Elvira Arellano, 31, a Mexican national, had hoped that U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve would rule that deporting her would violate the constitutional rights of her 7-year-old son, Saul, an American citizen.

But St. Eve ruled that no one's rights would be violated by deporting Arellano back to Mexico. She did say, however, the child would suffer a hardship.

"The question before the court is whether that hardship is of constitutional magnitude -- under any construction of the alleged facts, it is not," St. Eve said in her order.

St. Eve concluded that the pending removal order does not prevent Saul from exercising his rights of citizenship.

"Saul will not suffer any injury to his constitutional right to remain in the United States," she said.

Indeed, I'm struck by this observation that the Constitution is not violated just because all options available to a person have negative aspects to them.

"In fact, the injury Saul alleges is not the same as the injury his mother will suffer. Her injury is compelled removal; his is the unenviable fork in the road [i.e., whether to uproot or to live apart from his mother] that arises as a result of his mother's compelled removal," the judge said.

Yes, the boy can stay in the United States -- whether under the guardianship of someone designated by his mother or as a ward of the state. Or Saul's mother may elect to take her son back to Mexico, which in no way impairs his citizenship rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The choice is entirely in the hands of Elvira Arellano.

But then again, this all comes down to choices made by the mother.

Arellano was supposed to surrender for deportation to Mexico on Aug. 15.

Instead, she and her son moved into a cramped room in the storefront church sandwiched between a bank and a beauty parlor in Chicago's heavily Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood.

She has frequently told reporters visiting the church she wants to stay in the United States to provide a better life for herself and her son.

"I'm not going to leave. This is a place where God has put me, this is God's will and I'm going to stay here," Arellano has said.

Arellano first was deported from the United States shortly after illegally crossing the border in 1997, according to immigration enforcement. She says she returned within days, went on to live in Oregon for three years and moved to Chicago in 2000.

She was arrested in 2002 at O'Hare International Airport, where she was employed as a cleaning woman, and subsequently convicted of working under a false Social Security number.

So you see, this woman has broken American law multiple times, twice sneaking into this country like a thief in the night, working illegally in this country and fraudulently using false documentation. Violating her deportation order and hiding out in a church in an attempt to avoid the workings of American law (gee -- where are the church-state separationists on this one?) Oh, yeah -- and choosing to have a child.

The time has come for a SWAT team to enter the church to arrest Elvira Arellano.

Cuff her.

Stuff her.

Send her back.

Oh, yes -- and indict Rev. Walter Coleman, pastor of Adalberto United Methodist Church for harboring a fugitive.

And by the way -- this story presents the best available argument for amending the Constituion to do away with birthright citizenship for the children of border-jumping immigration criminals.

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Here is a politician with a little bit of moral clarity on the issue of terrorism and Islam.

A top German politician and close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday Islam was one of the main factors in religiously motivated violence, and urged Germany's Muslims to reject all forms of brutality.

But Ronald Pofalla, general-secretary of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, also acknowledged that many Muslims would find it painful that their religion was being abused for violent ends.

"Certainly it is painful for many Muslims that their religion is misused for violence," Pofalla wrote in a guest column for Sunday's Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

"But ... the problem of religiously motivated violence is today almost exclusively a problem of Islam. In addition, many of the victims are Muslims themselves," he said, according to extracts released in advance on Saturday.

Pofalla also noted that Muslims need to be prepared to accept criticism of their faith, as well as teh right of Christians to defend theirs.

The observation is quite accurate -- most of the victims of violence by Muslims are other Muslims. Now I could argue that Pofalla is wrong in stating that Islam is being misused, given the long and consistently bloody history of the followers of teh false prophet Muhammad, but I'm willing to concede that in many parts of the world we find a plurality of Muslims who object to terrorism in the name of their faith. The problem, of course, is that they are afraid to speak out or act against the violent faction among them.

I cannot help but be struck, however, by the response to a statement that implicitly rejects the notion that Islam is a violent faith and that notes that the violence takes a heavier toll on Muslims than on anyone else.

The Central Council of Muslims in Germany criticized Pofalla's comments, saying generalizations such as he made only reinforced stereotypes and prejudices.

"I get the impression that some CDU people want to take one step forward and two steps back," Aiman Mazyek, the Council's general-secretary, told Sunday's Tagesspiegel newspaper.

In other words, "How dare you criticize Islam, you infidel dog! You should be killed for insulting our religion."

Look for such statemetns to begin appearing from the jihadis any time now -- and for the Muslims who claim to oppose violence and oppression carried out in the name of their religion.