Lies, damn lies, and statistics

I'm relunctant to call attention to this woman or her website, as most of the time I find her amusing in a sad sort of way. Lately, though, she has begun to morph from pitiful to somewhat dangerous, mostly because she lacks the intellectual heft to distinguish between legitimate concerns regarding immigration, and mindless nativism. I say dangerous because she has this curious fascination with guns, and I think she considers herself some sort of Super Patriot, doing all she can to sound the alarm over the advancing brown invasion. Her post today poses the question "is illegal immigration more of a threat to "us" than terror"? To support this idiotic claim, she points to some rather dubious statistics, then as source she links to this sorry excuse for an elected official. He doesn't even bother to attempt to link to credible sources to support his shrill assertions. She asks her readers to "do the math." According to Rep King, 13 people a day are killed by drunk drivers who happen to lack documention to be here legally. So, I multiplied that number by 365, (cuz, you know, we never take a day off from our devious plan to wage a war of attrition on our nation's highways), and came up with 4,745 deaths. Her logic tells her that since 4745 is higher than the number killed fighting terror, drunk undocumented people are ipso facto more of a threat. Let's run with that a minute...According to what is arguably the oldest drunk driver watchdog group in the world, MADD, the total number of alcohol related traffic fatalities in 2005 was 16,881. Of that number, drivers between the ages of 15-20 removed 6,409 souls from the planet, and male drivers mowed down an alarming 9,988. In addition, between Thanksgiving and New Years, we lost 3,511. So, in doing my math, I have concluded that male drivers, young drivers, and the Holiday Season are all more of a threat than "the war on terror." Who knew? I should add the disclaimer that I am using only American dead,(as she is) but I'm pretty sure that the tens of thousands of Iraqi families that have lost members to this farce of a war would take issue with this construct.

I suppose I should point out to her the big red herring here, that a person's legal status has absolutely ZERO to do with their inclination to commit crime. I said this months ago, when the nativists were all pointing to Gustavo Reyes as the poster child for immigration failure, when in fact, it was a failure of our courts to imprison this man well before he amassed his lengthy criminal record. But, after reading her website, I'm pretty sure the logic would be lost on her. I can't bring myself to get into the whole gun/penis envy thingy...