Last year, a story broke that had a little something for everyone – where by “everyone” you’re referring to “incurious, uncritical consumers of shabby information”.

It involved a professor from the University of MInnesota, Dr. Massoud Amin.   Amin was convicted of “Theft by Swindle” for, it was alleged, concealing funds from his soon-to-be ex wife during a nasty divorce.

We’ll come back to that.

The story got liberals exercised because Amin was a gun collector (with, dare I say, a penchant for finding bargains).   That is a classic dog whistle for the left.

And for the, shall we say, less bright on the right?   A middle-eastern sounding name like Amin’s is enough to get the “WATCH FOR TEH SHARIA” crowd into a froth.

And the media coverage of his divorce proceedings – including the swindle allegations – were decidedly unsympathetic.

Sentencing in his trial is scheduled for November 9.

The client is obviously guilty – right?

Not so fast.  And according to sources with close knowledge of the case, the charges and conviction are well beyond a miscarriage of justice; they were the tip of an iceberg of shenanigans – borne of malice up against incompetence at best, cynical ambition at worst, all  slathered with a layer of legalism.

And when you peel back the onion, you still have something for everyone – among critical thinkers, this time:

• A divorce from hell
• City bureaucrats hamfistedly persecuting a law-abiding gun owner
• A legal process that reads like something between Michael Crichton and Franz Kafka, tainted by racism and amoral careerism
• And, at the end of the day, an American who has done decades of groundbreaking work defending this country from cyberterrorism, facing ten years in prison for something that, even if it were a legitimate conviction.
• Which, given the evidence I’ve encountered, it was not.

More tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason that cases like this infuriate people is we know what’s going on behind the curtain.

The public wants to be protected from impure food.  The customers in the lobby can’t see what’s going on in the kitchen.  Commercial food preparation is hidden from view, it’s not transparent, we can’t evaluate how much risk we’re taking.  So we empower the government to inspect food preparers, to make sure they are sanitary.  Safe food preparers get a permit to sell to the public.  The $30 fee is supposed to cover the cost of inspections.

A kid selling bottled water from his porch is different because his food preparation is transparent.  We can see the seal on the lid.  We know the risk we’re taking.  And even if it’s a kid selling Dixie Cups of Country Time lemonade poured from a pitcher, we can see the kid and judge the likelihood he’s infected our drink with salmonella or E. Coli.  We can decide whether to take our chances.  In that case, we don’t need the government to inspect the kid’s kitchen and the kid shouldn’t need a permit to sell to the public.

If the public can make that distinction, instinctively and automatically, why can’t the bureaucrat?  Because the food preparers who had to pay for the permit will complain that letting the kid sell without a permit is not fair, the kid is cutting into their business, the bureaucrat should level the playing field.  That’s not a public health issue, that’s rent-seeking and it pisses people off.

People learn.

Bureaucrats and bureaucracies, it seems, never do.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

First half property taxes are due May 15th. When I arrived at work this morning, customers were already lined up outside, waiting for the doors to open at 8 AM.

Retail stores open at midnight on Thanksgiving to serve customers. Banks are open on weekends to serve customers. Why aren’t we having extended hours when we know demand will be heavy?

Why doesn’t government have customer service?

Joe Doakes

It doesn’t need it.  While in the private sector “Service” means, well, service, in government it’s a euphemism for “showing the proles who’s boss”.

While MInneapolis’ mayor Betsy Hodges has spent four years diffusing her efforts over a bewildering jumble of social-justice virtue-signals, the poor woman will never top the list of “Mayors with Bizarre Priorities” list while New York’s Bill DiBlasio is in office.

Hizzoner’s latest target?  In a city with rising crime, infrastructure that’s crumbling faster than an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of Seven-Up, and a financial situation that is rapidly decaying, DiBlasio is…

…confiscating electric bicycles – which are booming in popularity, especially among delivery riders for stores and restaurants; they are in fact the most efficient way of navigating the most street-space-starved city in America:

On Thursday, de Blasio announced the nation’s largest city would start fining restaurants in addition to operators, expanding and formalizing a style of broken-windows policing favored by the NYPD, which has confiscated 900 e-bikes this year. His justification? E-bikes are “just too dangerous,” the mayor said at a press conference.

How dangerous are they? Nearly 70 pedestrians (and 13 cyclists) have been killed by cars, trucks, and buses in New York City this year. No one has been killed by a bicycle. As for e-bikes in particular? The NYPD has no data on e-bike accidents or complaints. Nor does the city have any information about how the crackdown affects restaurants or riders. De Blasio was acting on instinct: The crackdown began when a local cyclist, Matthew Shefler, called into his radio show to complain.

Slower, more expensive deliveries; more congestion; yet another handicap for small business, even the ones that don’t get fined.

Betsy has some huge shoes to fill in the “bizarre priorities” deparatment.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State of Minnesota is suing President Trump for ending payments that a federal judge has already ruled must be ended.  Attorney General Lori Swanson’s argument: President Obama started giving us illegal payments and President Trump continued the illegal payments while Congress worked on the problem.  We budgeted based on receiving illegal payments.  To suddenly end the illegal payments would inconvenience us by making us live within our own means, so therefore we’re entitled to continue receiving illegal payments, forever.

It’s illegal to follow the law.

Joe Doakes

To be fair to the Attorney General, it’s how the DFL has handled budgeting for the past six decades or so.

Eagan has a new city logo:  a more expensive version of the old city logo:

[The old] symbol, a more realistic green tree outlined in black, was in use since 2004. It was sometimes compared to a stalk of broccoli.

Eagan’s new, non-cruciferous-vegetable-looking logo. $75K. Not sure if that included the new city font.

A prominent graphic designer who lives in Eagan, Allan Peters, designed the updated logo for $75,000.

But practice makes perfect:

The city is on its fourth logo since the 1970s, each featuring what the city called a “strong, independent tree.”

This is what happens when a formerly sensible suburb gets overrun by DFLers fleeing DFL policies in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but who bring their DFL politics with ’em.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

St. Paul Police Chief Axtell does not know what he’s talking about.

Gun violence is exploding in St. Paul.  The Chief says “ . . . basically it’s yesterday’s fistfights are today’s gun fights.”  But then he says it’s “ . . . a community health problem, this is a public health crisis.”

No.

A health problem is caused by disease.  The cure is quarantine and medical treatment for those infected, and sanitation to prevent spread of illness.  Americans know very well how to handle outbreaks of disease.  St. Paul does not have a public health problem.

St. Paul has a cultural problem.  Perfectly healthy people are choosing to shoot each other instead of fistfight.  We’re not willing to quarantine residents in Frogtown and there is no medical treatment, no vaccine that cures bad behavior.  Bad behavior is cured by deterrence and punishment, to make bad behavior unacceptably costly to the actors.

When Charles Napier wanted to end the Hindu practice of burning wives alive on their husband’s funeral pyre, he explained to the priests: “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”  The practice of suttee ended abruptly.

In fairness, it may be that the Chief knows exactly what’s going on in his city, but he’s afraid to speak the truth because the City Council is a bunch of liberals more concerned with signaling their virtue by mouthing politically acceptable platitudes than with protecting their citizens by enacting effective law enforcement measures.  As long as the people dying are young Black men and poor children on the East Side, what’s the big deal?

Can we talk about adding another light rail line now? Because that’s a big deal. That’s something we care about.

Joe Doakes

I have to hope that there’s a lot of smart cops out there acting dumb because they want to keep their jobs.

The alternative?  Remember – today’s police forces didn’t exist when the Constitution was written.  I have a hunch they are more like the standing armies our forefathers feared than our current standing army is.

Do tell.

Why does the American political class spend so much time jabbering about “gun safety”, about gay marriage, about climate change?

To distract you from the economy, and the oncoming deflation of a huge entitlement debt bubble that is going to have drastic impact on…well, everything.

The California pension system – which is a bellwether for most blue-state-model pension systems around the country – is starting to groan under the strain of the contradictions it labors under (emphasis added):

As Steven Malanga has noted, both of these union-managed funds are notorious for pulling political stunts even as they face gaping shortfalls, going on a misguided “green” investing binge that flushed taxpayer money down the drain, and pulling out of tobacco companies on moral grounds just before those stocks began to rise.

But the underlying flaw with the funds is not their politicization. If anything, these kinds of moves are a distraction from more pressing crisis of public employee retirement systems: That state legislatures have epically over-promised the level of retirement benefits they can reasonably provide, and obscured this reality by presuming levels of investment returns that are impossible to sustain, especially in this era of historically low interest rates.

The choice is pretty stark – massive reforms, including a shift away from defined-benefit pensions for public employees, and other tough choices.

Politicians from both sides hate tough choices – but it’s the blue model that’s given us this debt, and it’s the blue states that are facing the most immediate fallout.

Minnesota’s public plans are – depending on your political point of view – either better-administered, or do a better job of laundering the money.  Maybe it’s a little bit of both, combined with a state that has a better income-to-debt ratio than California for now, but the pain might strike us later.

Emphasis is on “later”.