Your Liberal Over-Reaction of the Day

Migrant workers are becoming scarce, so one Idaho company is turning to prisoners:

Potatoes are worth gold to Idaho’s economy, but that’s not why an armed guard oversees red T-shirted workers at the SunGlo packing plant located deep in tuber country. Workers from Mexico have become more scarce, so the Sugar City, Idaho-based company’s managers have a different source of employees: prison.

“We’ve gone as far as hiring the college students just to get through,” Tom Sessions, a supervisor at SunGlo, told The Associated Press on Friday. ”We got rid of that and got the inmates.”

Sounds good and sounds far better than what’s been proposed by Senator Craig. We have prisoners process potatoes to punish crime, rather than greating amnesty to folks to come here to process the potatoes in order to reward crime. But Tom Paine at 43rd State Blues had the most hysterical reaction of the day:

Yep, you heard it right, Idaho has started allowing convicts to work the potato fields…shades of the old South (but can they make good pork bar-b-que?). ["Yessir Masser Geddes, I believes, can I git my own planet now? & some child-brides?"]

Shades of the Old South. Why wasn’t slavery outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Yes indeedy, the 13th Amendment says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

So, maybe it’s not like the Old South. Honestly, I don’t think I could make up a more silly reaction to this whole case.