It’s Tuesday. Pay up, Wimpy.

UPDATE AND BUMP: See, because there was this guy on the Popeye cartoon named Wimpy, who liked hamburgers . . .

A local paper reports:

The drunken motorist who fatally injured a California Highway Patrol officer Saturday night is a suspected illegal immigrant from Mexico who was driving without a license, officials said Monday.

Which paper is that, you might well ask — the L.A. Times?

Ha, ha! See? I laugh uproariously at your silly attempt at humor!

No, in all seriousness, the paper in question is the Victorville Daily Press, which reports the revelation in this story.

Now, I don’t exactly know what the article means when it calls the motorist a “suspected” illegal immigrant from Mexico, but my guess is that it’s kind of like saying O.J. “allegedly” killed two people in cold blood — i.e., we all know it’s true, but there are legal problems with saying so forthrightly. After all, we also say that the motorist is a “suspected” drunk driver, even though he blew almost 3 times the legal limit.

I have previously blogged about the importance of the “suspected” drunk driver’s immigration status in previous posts on this topic here, here, and here. Quite simply, if a CHP officer died through the actions of someone who didn’t belong in this country to begin with, that’s news. And it’s news that the region’s largest newspaper is, unaccountably, not reporting.

It looks like it’s time for the L.A. Times to play catch-up to the responsible journalism of the desert newspapers — or, more likely, to continue to entirely ignore this aspect of the story.

P.S. Another e-mail has been sent to the long-suffering Readers’ Representative. They can’t claim they haven’t been told . . .

Yesterday a Barstow newspaper reported that a suspected drunk driver who killed a CHP officer had “a fake identification card, a Mexican identification card and other identification all with different names and different variations of names.”

News? You betcha! It suggests that the killer may have been an illegal immigrant who never should have been in the U.S. to begin with.

News reported by the L.A. Times? Don’t make me emit a mordant chuckle!

Despite this evidence suggesting that the officer’s killer was an illegal immigrant, the Los Angeles Times has printed not one word of this information. In today’s story, titled Shaken by Deaths, CHP Reviews Safety Policies, the paper shows no curiosity whatsoever concerning whether the man who killed the officer was legally in this country.

Is this not news? Obviously, it is. So (he asked rhetorically), what exactly is going on here?

I guess we’ll have to await the answer from the Readers’ Representative as to why only desert-based papers appear capable of reporting this information. When I hear something, you’ll hear something.

Confirm Them reports on a New Republic review of a new book by Joan Biskupic about Justice O’Connor. From the review:

. . .Starr had committed a huge error. On April 29, 1970, O’Connor had voted to repeal Arizona’s anti-abortion law, and two prominent Phoenix newspapers publicly reported her vote. When asked by Biskupic to explain his oversight, “Starr said he had no reason to check local newspapers to see if her vote had been recorded. If Starr had taken such a step he would have discovered that the proposed legislation was front-page news and the subject of considerable controversy in Arizona eleven years earlier–and that O’Connor had voted for the measure to decriminalize abortion.” Instead of undertaking his own independent inquiry, Biskupic observes, “Starr had taken O’Connor’s word for everything.” In so doing, he had smoothed her way to a nomination that almost certainly would have been denied her had those old news clippings been discovered….

It’s hard to imagine such an oversight like this having much effect in the age of the blogosphere. The oversight would have been corrected within days.

Had Harriet Miers been nominated in 1981, she likely would have sailed through the Senate. Now that we have an “Army of Davids” with a universe of facts at their fingertips, the world is a different place.

UPDATE: Commenter steve tries to burst my bubble, and succeeds, by noting that O’Connor’s vote was indeed disclosed during her confirmation proceedings.