Rhode Island has been literally committing highway robbery for the past few years on I-95, extorting $3000 from commercial truck drivers for passing over a small segment of that highway if they miss a sign on the side of the road stating that they can't. GTA in Massachusetts, Red Dead Redemption in Rhode Island.

Dan,

I believe there are six illuminated blinking warnings about the bridge between the I-95 entrance into our state from the south alone and the Pawtucket River bridge. Maybe the reason so many are making it all the way to the bridge is the fact that so many of the truck drivers are not able to read the warning signs. A gentleman claiming to be an active long haul over the road truck driver stated on WPRO the other day that something like 60% of the drivers he encounters barely speak English. The only other reason would be that they are BLIND!!!!!

Mennino sounds retarded.
Seriously.Stealing cars is a felony.
Shoplifting is a misdemeanor.
Is Mennino suggesting that foreign nationals(I'm tired of seeing"immigrant"used incorrectly)be exempt from such laws?
What a fart in a suit he is.

I read Howie's column today. What I took from it is this; when you are stopped by the police, start speaking bad Spanish with a sing-song dialect. They will assume you are Mexican and give you a pass.

Bill Buckley, and family, spoke Spanish. That is because they were in the oil business in Mexico, until the Mexicans confiscated it.

At least back into the 70's, uniformed Mexican police carried sub-machine guns, rather than pistols. I assume there was a message there, but I didn't get it. I also became used to being approached by European looking Mexicans, simply to speak English. They complained of being governed by Indians, and almost always related that their family had sent money and guns to Texas. I was just there on hunting trips,and rarely went to big cities. Bias everywhere, I suppose. I once had an office in the Dominican Republic, there is a standard joke about having to "appear white" to run for politics. A comparison of the populace with the elected officials seems to bear that out.

Leprechaun - Defending the indefensible is a pointless intellectual exercise. We can continue to quibble over how many signs there are (I don't believe six for a moment) and how well they are lit, but lack of notice only amounts to a single component of this affront to good government and interstate commerce. If this is a legitimate corrective operation, then why haven't they fixed the "bridge" yet (which most truck drivers don't recognize as a bridge in the first place, hence their confusion)? They've already collected more than triple the amount required to fix it. It's a highway robbery, plain and simple - the state needs money, lot's of it, and these truck drivers don't vote in Rhode Island.