Joel Rosenberg is currently sitting in jail for violating a court order signed by Hennepin County Chief Judge Jim Swenson that declared that guns were not allowed in “courtrooms” in Henco…

…notwithstanding that he was not arrested in a “courthouse” – he was arrested at the office of the Chief of Police, which wasn’t even listed on Judge Swenson’s court order.  No matter – Judge Swenson had declared some county buildings to be “courthouses”.  And Henco judge Janet Poston is apparently closing ranks with a cop who apparently embarassed himself by arresting Rosenberg for behaving entirely legally – all apparently entirely by judicial fiat.

So I got to wondering; how else can a county judge pre-empt state law with a stroke of the pen?

And after exhaustive research, here they are:  The Top Ten Laws-By-Proclamation From Henco Judge Swenson.

10. All Hennepin County residents not wearing aluminum foil pants shall be subject to tasing and confiscation of property, at the sole discretion of Judge Poston.

9. Judges shall not be referred to as “your honor”, but as “your serene majesty”.

8. All betting spreads are doubled for judges, police, fire, and county administrative employees, and other county workers as defined by a Hennepin County judge.

7. No tabs are to be picked up by Hennepin County judges.

6. The United States Constitution and Minnesota state law are both considered to be  firearms, for purposes of “Courthouse” carry restrictions.

5. So is “satirizing Judge Swenson’s alleged penchant for authoritarian overreach”.

4. Manny’s Steak House is now legally considered to be “Judge Swenson’s chambers”.

3. Britney Spears is totally hotter than Christina Aguilera.

2. All of Hennepin County is actually an elementary school; nobody can possess a firearm within 1,000 yards of Hennepin County.

1. The law is pretty much whatever Judge Swenson says it is; if you don’t believe it, bend over and INSERT VIOLENT VERB and in the INSERT AWKWARD BIT OF ANATOMY.

Whew.  Seems pretty draconian to me.  But we’d best not complain; they’re all legal and stuff.

Wanna good laugh for the  morning?

Here’s a scan from Henco’s complaint against Joel Rosenberg:

Now, as I’ve ascertained, I’m no lawyer.

But Mark Bennett is.  And he’s got the ultimate write-up, so far, of the Rosenberg case.  It’s over at his blog.

The warrant is for the felony of carrying a firearm in the courthouse. Because carrying a firearm in the courthouse complex is a felony—except for “persons who carry pistols according to the terms of a permit issued under section 624.714 and who so notify the sheriff or the commissioner of public safety, as appropriate“—which, oddly enough, is a category into which Joel neatly fits. And except that the city hall is not really a part of the courthouse complex, but a judge says it is.

The warrant is also for contempt of court because, you see, there was a judge’s order declaring the police station a courthouse (how many legs does a dog have, if a judge says that a tail is a leg?) and barring citizens from carrying firearms there—except that, among other problems, “no sheriff, police chief, governmental unit, government official, government employee, or other person or body acting under color of law or governmental authority may … limit the exercise of a permit to carry.”

Bennett, a defense attorney in Texas, points out the rather odd circumstances of  a judge INSERT A VERB a court order that didn’t even have a charge filled in:

Yes, it is in fact alleged that he DESCRIBE BEHAVIOR in contempt of the Hennepin County Juvenile Court. Now, I ask you: can we really have people like Joel Rosenberg going around DESCRIBE BEHAVIOR? I say not, and I say we should DESCRIBE KANGAROO PROCEDURE and then DESCRIBE BIZARRE AND PAINFUL PUNISHMENT them.

I don’t ordinarily pick on other people’s judges—Texas being a target-rich environment—but what kind of Ruben-Guerrero judge is Janet Poston, to sign an arrest warrant based on the allegation that someone has DESCRIBE BEHAVIOR? She didn’t even bother to read the papers.

Conclusion?

So Rosenberg will sit in jail dealing with his health problems, and Rosenberg will fight the case, and Rosenberg will win the case. And, before all is said and done, Sergeant Palmer’s little self-esteem-fluffing exercise will cost the city a pretty penny.

Read the whole thing.

And I hope that when Joel’s lawsuit is over he has the City of Minneapolis by the DESCRIBE A TENDER PIECE OF ANATOMY, and walks out with DESCRIBE ABSURD AMOUNT OF MONEY.

Joel Rosenberg got arrested yesterday while at Minneapolis City Hall.

The Strib has the story – relating the same story we did earlier (parts I, II and III) – and then yesterday’s “incidence”,  sort of:

On Wednesday, Rosenberg was booked into the county jail on charges of possession of a dangerous weapon in a courthouse, a felony, and contempt of court, a misdemeanor.

City Hall is part of the courthouse complex because it houses conciliation court on the third floor, the charges say. A sign posted in the hallway that connects City Hall with the county Government Center states that weapons are prohibited by district court order.

Rosenberg was being held in jail Wednesday night in lieu of $100,000 bail.

Rosenberg, of course, contents that the county’s “court order” barring guns in the hands of legally-permitted carriers from county courts conflicts with state law.

His court appearance is scheduled 1:30 this afternoon.

Here’s Part III of Joel Rosenberg’s side of his encounter with Minneapolis Police sergeant Bill Palmer last month.

The incident was the subject of a fairly egregious bit of lousy reporting by the City Pages, among others.

———-

Part Two: The Contempt of Court that Joel Didn’t Commit

By Joel Rosenberg

And so, we finally arrive at the point of this particular part of the exercise, where we get to the crimes that Bill Palmer committed when he lunged at me, took my gun without authority, acting under color of law and authority, and only gave it back — and only let me continue to examine the public data that he, as MPD Data Practices Officer, had invited me to Tim Dolan’s office to examine — when I submitted to his unlawful order to remove it from City Hall.

And, let’s once again, look at the law, as it’s written, with some emphasis added.

609.27 COERCION.

Subdivision 1. Acts constituting. Whoever orally or in writing makes any of the following threats and thereby causes another against the other’s will to do any act or forbear doing a lawful act is guilty of coercion and may be sentenced as provided in subdivision 2:

(1) a threat to unlawfully inflict bodily harm upon, or hold in confinement, the person threatened or another, when robbery or attempt to rob is not committed thereby; or

(2) a threat to unlawfully inflict damage to the property of the person threatened or another; or

(3) a threat to unlawfully injure a trade, business, profession, or calling; or

(4) a threat to expose a secret or deformity, publish a defamatory statement, or otherwise to expose any person to disgrace or ridicule; or

(5) a threat to make or cause to be made a criminal charge, whether true or false; provided, that a warning of the consequences of a future violation of law given in good faith by a peace officer or prosecuting attorney to any person shall not be deemed a threat for the purposes of this section.

Subd. 2.Sentence.

Whoever violates subdivision 1 may be sentenced as follows:

(1) to imprisonment for not more than 90 days or to payment of a fine of not more than $1,000, or both if neither the pecuniary gain received by the violator nor the loss suffered by the person threatened or another as a result of the threat exceeds $300, or the benefits received or harm sustained are not susceptible of pecuniary measurement; or

(2) to imprisonment for not more than five years or to payment of a fine of not more than $10,000, or both, if such pecuniary gain or loss is more than $300 but less than $2,500; or

(3) to imprisonment for not more than ten years or to payment of a fine of not more than $20,000, or both, if such pecuniary gain or loss is $2,500, or more.

History: 1963 c 753 art 1 s 609.27; 1971 c 23 s 40; 1977 c 355 s 7; 1983 c 359 s 87; 1984 c 628 art 3 s 11; 1986 c 444; 2004 c 228 art 1 s 72

609.43 MISCONDUCT OF PUBLIC OFFICER OR EMPLOYEE.

A public officer or employee who does any of the following, for which no other sentence is specifically provided by law, may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than one year or to payment of a fine of not more than $3,000, or both:

(1) intentionally fails or refuses to perform a known mandatory, nondiscretionary, ministerial duty of the office or employment within the time or in the manner required by law; or

(2) in the capacity of such officer or employee, does an act knowing it is in excess of lawful authority or knowing it is forbidden by law to be done in that capacity; or

(3) under pretense or color of official authority intentionally and unlawfully injures another in the other’s person, property, or rights; or

(4) in the capacity of such officer or employee, makes a return, certificate, official report, or other like document having knowledge it is false in any material respect.

History: 1963 c 753 art 1 s 609.43; 1984 c 628 art 3 s 11; 1986 c 444

Lets review the bidding, shall we?

Palmer threatened to arrest me if I didn’t leave. He had no right to arrest me; none at all, regardless of his interpretation of the court order. (I’ll get to that in a minute.) Doesn’t matter what the judge’s interpretation of the court order is, either, for the same reason. It’s null and void, and WOULD BE constitutionally overbroad with regard to the Minneapolis City Hall, if it applied to City Hall at all.

It doesn’t. I’ll get back to that again.

Whoever orally … makes any of the following threats and thereby causes another against the other’s will to do any act or forbear doing a lawful act is guilty of coercion….

a threat to unlawfully…hold in confinement…. (that’s the threat of arrest that Palmer made, repeatedly. Let’s keep going) a threat to make or cause to be made a criminal charge

609.43 Misconduct of a public officer …

A public officer or employee …. does an act knowing it is in excess of lawful authority… or intentionally and unlawfully injures another in the other’s rights…

Which is why Palmer’s lawyered up.

One last, minor thing. “But wait, you say; there was a court order for Minneapolis City Hall at 300 South Fifth Street. It might be questionable, but until the courts determine that it’s invalid, you have to abide by it, Joel. That court order, just as it was written, was effective on that date — Craig Steiner, the head of Minneapolis Data Practices, told you so.”

And I’ve shared with you a copy of that court order, which was, arguably (not very, but a weak argument could be made) effective on that date for 300 South Fifth Street, Minneapolis City Hall.

Let’s take Bill Palmer’s word for it that he was familiar with this court order. He’d read it, he studied it, and by God he was going to enforce it. He was going to grab me, to threaten me to compel me not to carry at 300 South Fifth Street.

The address of Minneapolis City Hall, though, is at 350 South 5th Street. It says so, right on their official web page.

Hell, you can ask Bill Palmer that. He should know. He works there. At 350th South 5th Street.

Ask him, but remember, he does have the right to remain silent. He had that right in Tim Dolan’s office, too. He had the right to remain silent; he had the right to keep his hands to himself; he had the right to not engage in coercion or misconduct. He had every right to not grab my property — and no right whatsoever to take it, without my permission — at all. He had no right to hold it as a hostage to my compliance to his unlawful demands.

He had the right to not commit any crime at all.

He did not, however, have the ability.

Too bad that you can’t find a City Attorney around when you need one to draw up a summons and warrant, isn’t it?

Susan Seigel, Minneapolis City Attorney: please have one of your prosecutors draw up papers and charge the son of a bitch?

Thanks in advance.

More on this story coming up, I have a hunch, this week.

A few weeks ago, I ran the first part of a three-part series by Joel Rosenberg regarding his confrontation with Minneapolis Police sergeant Bill Palmer.

The confrontation was captured on video.

The City Pages tittered about the story, but really didn’t understand it.

Here’s Part II.  Part III follows later today.

Part Two: The Contempt of Court that Joel Didn’t Commit

By Joel Rosenberg

When last we left our heroes, we were about to take a look at the court order that poor Bill Palmer couldn’t find, and which he pretended to be trying to enforce. He knew better, which is why he didn’t arrest me.

Here it is:

———-WHEREAS it is the court’s responsibility to ensure the proper, safe, and orderly administratio nof justice throughout Hennepin County coutr facilities, and

WHEREAS the Court has a weapons policy in place since July 12, 1995 that prohibits any firearm or other weapons from being taken into a courtroom or the environs of any other juvenile justice or other court facility witin Hennepin County except under certain conditions described below,

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all persons, exept as provided in this Order, are prohibited form having weapons on their person or in their possession in Hennepin County court facilities, regardless of whether or not they have a firearms permit, and

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that persons entering Hennepin County court facilities may be subject to screening for weapons upon entry; anyone refusing to submit to such searches shall be refused admission, and

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that all weapons, including but not limited to firearms and any related ammunition, stun guns, taser weapons, and replica or toy guns shall be removed form said persons before they are allowed to proceed further into the court facility and

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that this order shall not apply to licensed peace officers or federally authorized law enforcement agents in the performance of their official duties. Only law enforcement personnel empowered by law to carry weapons may enter a court facility with a weapon. The peace officer exception to the Order shall not apply to officers present in court as private parties, support persons, or to provide testimony not required by their job duties, and

IT IS FURTHE RORDERED that weapons be used as an exhibit in an official proceeding may be taking into a courtroom or any other court facility only fter they have been checked for safety by the Hennepin County Sheriff or HSeriff’s designee, e sealed in a transparent vinyl tape envelope or otherwise be secured to ensure security during the proceedings by a peace offier in the performance of official duties, and

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Hennepin County Court facilities include:

1. Hennepin Government Center

300 South Sixth Street, Minneapolis

2. Minneapolis City Hall,

300 Wouth Fifth Street, Minneapolis

3. District Court Division II – Brookdale

6125 Shingle Creek Parkway, Brooklyn Center

4. Disrict Court Division III – Ridgedale,

12601 Ridgedale Drive, Minnetonka

5. District Court Division IV – Southdale

7009 York Drive, Edina

6. Hennepin County Public Safety Facility

401 South Fourth Avenue, Minneapolis

7. Hennepin County Family Justice Center

110 South Fourth Street, Minneapolis

8. Hennepin County Juvenile Justice Center

626 South Sixth Street, Minneapolis

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that any person violating this Order shall be suejct to being held in contempt of court and may be subject to a jail sentence.

This Order is effective immediately.

Date: 9/28/08

———-

Interesting, isn’t it? The judge appears to have decided that Minneapolis City Hall is part of the Hennepin County Court complex.

How’s that work? Can the judge decide that a radius of a thousand miles from his bench is part of the court complex? How about fifty? How about the McDonald’s across the street? How about Minneapolis City Hall?

Well, there’s actually just a touch of logic to that — there are courtrooms in City Hall. They’re not used all that often, I understand, but when they are being used by a judge for official county business, the order would clearly apply.

But the rest of it? Nah. It’s what’s called “unconstitutionally broad.” Ask your favorite law professor; I’ve asked more than one of mine.

Here’s what one said:

“This covers entire buildings where courtrooms and court office space are only a portion, often small and temporary, of the entire facility. A good example is the Minneapolis city hall. This order is OVERBROAD [his emphasis. JR].”

In practice, the order is enforced, almost all the time, perfectly legitimately, by the HCSO: outside the security zone of the courthouse, no problem; permit holders come and go, carrying if they please as they do whatever business they have with the courts. Before going into the zone, the permit holder disarms, and stores his weapons somewhere — typically, out in the car.

Easy, peasy.

Also in practice: Tim Dolan and the badged bullies of the MPD have been using their willfully false “interpretation” of the order to bully permit holders into not carrying anywhere in city hall. But they don’t *dare* actually arrest somebody who has, like me, given notice (covering the felony issue, even if you believe that, say, the janitor’s closet in City Hall is a courtroom).

Why? Because they know that the order, being overboard, is utterly unenforceable.

And if they try to enforce it?

That’s for the last chapter: The Crimes Bill Palmer Committed.

Later today – where Palmer allegedly messed up.

Jay Nygard wants to erect a small wind turbine in an unobtrusive spot on his own property.

Nygard admits he poured a concrete pad for the turbine after the city rejected his application for a building permit. But he and his attorney claim the city is overstepping its authority and discouraging a homeowner and entrepreneur from helping the environment.

“Here I’m trying to go green and they’re trying to throw me in jail,” Nygard said.

Here’s the interesting part:

…even though Orono doesn’t explicitly ban wind generators in Nygard’s neighborhood, the city has broad authority to limit what people build on their property.”We’re not going to discourage people from doing green things,” White said. “It’s just when and where.”

…city zoning ordinances typically prohibit everything that is not explicitly allowed…

Discuss.

New undershirts, ready for TSA scanning:

Count me in.

The other day, we ran the video of Joel Rosenberg’s encounter with Minneapolis Police sergeant Bill Palmer, along with some derisive catcalls at the City Pages’ “coverage” of the incident.

Joel is, I should add for those who don’t follow science fiction literature or Second Amendment law, both a science fiction writer and the author of the definitive concealed carry bibles for both Minnesota and Missouri (?). 

Among many other things.

The following is Part I of Joel’s account of his encounter with Sergeant Palmer.

———-
The Palmer Fiasco:  Part One:  Why Joel Isn’t A Criminal

By Joel Rosenberg

A few preparatory matters…

The Palmer Fiasco is only a small part of what’s going on. I could get into the malicious, false arrest of my wife the dismissal of the charges, once she and her lawyer made it clear that they weren’t interested in a plea, but her complete and total exoneration; and, last weekend, the reinstatement of the charges against her. I could get into the data practices requests I’ve been making, and Bill Palmer’s unlawful demand for money before he started to do his job. I could get into the connection to http://gangstrikefarce.com, and how I told Jesse Garcia of the Minneapolis Police Department that I had been working on a book on that, before I ran into a much, much bigger story.

But I’ll save that for another time, and just point whoever’s interested to http://familymatterii.com. There’s a lot going on. Leave it at that, for now.

In order to understand the crimes that Bill Palmer committed—that’s crimes, plural—you have to know a little law, both in statute, and in practice.

[Continued after the jump]

(more…)

Homeland Security, as this new video from MNMajority shows, knows who that real enemy is.

Know your place, peasants!

It is not to question your betters!

It is not to gainsay the job Barack “Bitter Gun-Clinging Jesus Freaks” has done!  It is not to question the work of Janet “It’s The Religious Right We Really Need To Worry About” Napolitano!  It is not to criticize the work of Mark Ritchie!  It is not to hold your media accountable for not holding this state’s power elite accountable!

It is to pay for a Better Minnesota and USA!

Now Do Your Job!

From 2004, Lex Green at the Chicago Boys blog – the best political/economics blog that I never have time to read – worked over the “United States of Canada” meme – the sore losers who sprang up after John Kerry got sent back to Ville de Palooque:

The basic idea is that the Blue Staters are so horrified about living under the rule of George Bush that they want to break the USA into pieces and form their own country. Of course, they are just venting.

The core strength of “liberal” America resides in the descendants of Yankee puritans, a memetic “Greater New England” that sprang from the Yankee diaspora which settled the Northern tier of the country. These folks have been living uneasily with their fellow Americans for over 350 years. They have been trying to reform the rest of us for our own good the whole time: Revolution, abolition, prohibition, civil rights, environmentalism � . Sometimes they are even right, as much as I hate to admit it. Look at a picture of Cotton Mather, or Susan B. Anthony, or any eat-your-peas liberal do-gooder. The eyes: sad at the foolishness and injustice of the world — the mouth, a mirthless line — and the jaw, set in determination to rectify the world’s wrongs and smite its wrongdoers. Those Yankees, genetic or memetic, are the core of the “progressive” element in American life, and they have been for centuries, and they’ll never change.

Spoofing this movement was some of the most fun I’ve had writing this blog.

And now, ripped from the headlines, “Jamie Stiehm” writes in USN&WR:

All states are not created equal, as this summer’s performances in Congress and other political platforms show anew. Some states are pretty great; some are just plain trouble. Take [Texas, Arizona and South Carolina], for example…

…let me make a modest proposal: that the states that seceded–let them be gone! That means South Carolina, Texas, and even Florida as a bonus, along with the Deep South states that send recalcitrant Republican representatives to Washington with no intention of doing the nation’s business. They are there to block, taunt, and undermine a president, a man from Illinois making social progress. This time, let’s let them go without a fight. Oh, and we’ll keep Virginia, more reconstructed than the rest, and give them Arizona.

…by way of calling for the reddest of the red states to secede.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on the comparison here; people from the ultra-conservative fringe advocate secession = knitted brows and outraged talk of sedition.  Typically vapid Ivy League legacy slime working puff jobs with major media outlets talk about seceding or expelling states that offend them = look at the shiny object.

Wonder if Erik Black will furrow his brow and write a scholarly piece dissecting the pathologies of the left’s mania for secession.

I’ll take “Under” on the over/under.

The topic of the breakup of the United States bounces around every once in a while.  Often it’s a comic subject – as last year, when a Russian tycoon predicted we’d break up into six countries each aligned, conveniently, with a European or Asian power (or Latin-American “power”).

It’s been rattling about lately because of the newfound acceptance of what used to be Big-L Libertarian rhetoric, since the rise of Ron Paul.  To a big-L libetarian, naturally, liberty comes before government.

We’ll come back to that.

Erik Black at the MinnPost has been writing a series of posts on “understanding tentherism”, which has been a useful, challenging exercise (and which deserves a more-detailed set of answers, but I haven’t had the time what with having to keep Minnesota safe from Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and all).  There was, naturally, no commensurate hand-wringing in 2004 over the wave of lefties who called for breaking the Blue states off to join Canada, but then apparently the left has a sense of humor about their own wackos that they don’t share with the right’s.

But I digress.  Black says:

The more I obsess on it, the more convinced I am that Tentherism is the key to the biggest ideological divide in American political culture. It takes the perpetual argument about how big the government should be and how much it should do, and attaches to the adoration of the founders and the framers and the belief in the Constitution as our secular/sacred text.

Which is an interesting assertion, and one I’ll address in a future post.

But long story short, I think Black has things backwards.  We’ll come back to that in a bit.

Black notes with the sort of shock that the left always shows when the subject comes up – feigned or real – that some conservatives are actually engaging in edgy rhetoric about the subject that must never be mentioned…:

Yes, secession.

If you think the civil war talk is crazy, did you notice that a sitting congressman, who is a candidate for governor of Tennessee, said last week that he hoped the next couple of election cycles would come out right “so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government?”

Hard to take that as anything less than an assertion that states have a right to secede and that if things keep going the way they are going, some states might exercise that right.

Monday that Tennessee guv candidate, U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, said that if he is elected Tennessee will not secede from the union, although there was no takeback of the assertion that it could.

“Could” Tennessee, or any state, secede?  We fought a war at least in part over the question once upon a time – but that’s really neither an answer nor the subject that interests me.

Black says “tentherism” is the key to our current political divide.  I say it’s a byproduct of the real key.

And the real key to “the divide” in America today is one’s answer to these two questions.

First:  To what does an American truly pledge his/her allegiance?  To…:

A) America the physical entity with four million square miles of land, and its government with its capitol and it’s branches and bureaucracies and fifty sub-governments with their sub-branches and sub-bureaucracies?

B) Or is it to the one thing that created America – the idea of liberty, that we are all created equal, that we are a nation under a creator that endowed us with inalienable rights which no government has the legitimate power to take away?

How you answer that is “the key” to the divide. Is America the ideal of liberty?  Or is it a government?

That’s the easy question, of course; plenty of people – especially those who see themselves as principled liberals or Liberals – will answer “B” almost by reflex.

Of course, there are not a few people out there who are solid “A”s – Pete Stark’s “the Constitution is irrelevant, and the Fed can pretty much do what it wants” outburst is the A-list version, but he’s hardly the only “government uber alles” activist among America’s suit class.

Still, Stark and his ilk are basically cartoons.

But there’s a second question.

If our government decayed to the point where it could realistically be said to have rejected the ideals that this country is ostensibly built around, and there is no realistic electoral or legal remedy, is it a citizen’s duty to…:

A) Suck it up and go along with it, because it’s our government, dammit, or…

B) Find a place and/or a means to re-instate those ideals, even if it means starting a new country that actually does enshrine what America really means?

That’s where the question gets interesting.

I’m imagining certain peoples’ answers even as I write this.

So if the United States’ federal government ever abrogated the Constitution to an extent that was utterly, unmistakably a thumb in the eye of the notion of the “government of, by and for the people” – say, if presidents stopped handing over power peacefully, or if one branch of government shut down one of the others – would the states (forget the people for a moment) have a duty to stay in the country if they had a better idea?

(more…)

…if this had been suggested…:

Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.

…during the Bush administration?

Minnesota now has 75,000 carry permits, according to the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.  That’s running just a tad ahead of the national average.

Just over seven years after its passage, the Minnesota Citizens’ Personal Protection Act of 2003 has resulted in over 75,000 people who now have active carry permits, a 500% increase over the number in effect before the law was reformed.

According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, there were 75,583 active permits as of May 31, 2010.

Still no problems.

“Increasingly, personal protection is becoming more widely and socially accepted,” said David Gross, a criminal defense attorney, member of the GOCRA board, and long-time advocate for the right of self defense. He points at the recent controversy manufactured by gun control advocates over law-abiding citizens carrying holstered guns into Starbucks coffee shops. Starbucks refused to give in to demands that it ban gun-carrying customers.

“That is literally visible here in Minnesota, too,” he said, “The number of ‘bans guns’ signs continues to dwindle as businesses return the respect shown by gun owners.”

Back in 1987, when Florida became the ninth “Shall Issue” state (there are 40 today) , Florida state senator Ron Silver coined the phrase “Gunshine State”, expecting the state to turn into “Dodge City East”.  He famously admitted he’d been utterly wrong within the next five or six years.

It’s happened here, too:

Even vocal opponents of the law, like former Olmsted County Sheriff Steve Borchardt, revised their opinions as law-abiding Minnesotans remained law abiding after earning permits.”The fact is the sky didn’t fall,” he told KARE11 in 2005. “The fact is it worked pretty seamlessly.”

Which hasn’t stopped the left from continuing to lie about shall issue – but you get the impression the smart ones don’t have their hearts in it.

I looked at the headline for this piece at Minnesota “Progressive” Project – “Reflections on the upside of the “The Nanny State”” – and thought “oh, goodie – Grace Kelly is at it again”.

The first graf did nothing to shake the first impression:

Who’s afraid of nannies?Not me. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t help but love Julie Andrews in both of her nanny roles, as the high-flying Mary Poppins and the exuberant governess of the wealthy Von Trapp family in “The Sound of Music.”
Or maybe it’s because my youngest daughter actually is working this year as a nanny for an affluent New York City family.

I flipped, pro forma, to the bottom to confirm – and was just a little bit stunned to see it was actually the always-intelligent Dane Smith, former “Dean of Minnesota Political Reporters (although on any given day Pat Kessler and Bill Salisbury also qualify), who now runs “Growth and Justice”, a liberal think tank.

And I gotta confess – he usually does better than this:

Whatever the reason, I am not exactly fear-stricken when government bashers raise the specter of – hide under your beds now – “The Nanny State.”

That’s more fodder for my “Chanting Points Memo” series – the liberal meme that anyone who opposes big government and big taxes does it out of “fear”.  You hear it everywhere – I saw a mainstream media commentator call the passage of Obamacare a “victory over fear”.  Of all the left’s memes, it’s among the most cynical – a mass attempt to frame all dissent as irrational.  It may make good political rhetoric; it’s a lousy way to run a civil society.

Smith goes on to list some of the blessings government brings – food and drug regulation, makign sure oil companies clean up their messes, public education…

…er, we’ll get back to that one.

And Smith – a self-described “former Republican”, although one of the Arne Carlson variety – isn’t completely blinkered:

Let’s concede that our democratic governments’  instinct to protect and serve, and to respond to every problem and highly publicized accident or failure, can be a bit much.

My own favorite example of overreach is from several years ago, when the Minnesota Legislature, worried about salmonella poisoning, tried to crack down on potluck dinners by prohibiting people from bringing certain kinds of homemade casseroles to the church brunch.  Public outrage nipped that one in the bud, and personally, I’d risk my life for grandma’s hot dish.

The quibble, of course, is that government does do things that people need, want or, in some cases, get foisted on them, sometimes “for their own or society’s good”.   Some of those things, most of agree on; a court system, a military to defend at the very least the nation’s borders (!), police and fire departments. 

There are also regulations that everyone agrees on: don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t do material harm to other people or their property.

But you don’t have to go too far before you start getting to “optional” territory, the stuff not eveyrone agrees on.

But we also need to seriously consider the alternatives to laws and regulations that protect the safety, health and welfare of real people. safeguard public health and safety,  and reflect on the good that nannies do.

First, we need to remember that the nannying responses arise from repetitive, often outrageous, and sometimes lethal failures by individuals and the private sector to protect the common good.

And as a limited government advocate (Smith uses the term “Government Basher”, which is a tad pejorative), even I might agree that “repetitive, outrageous and lethal” might be good yardsticks for finding things that need regulating – especially things where I, a private citizen, would have to resort to outrageous and lethal means to get redress.

But we all know that the vast majority of government programs and regulations cover things that are dubiously outrageous, and are lethal only if the paperwork falls on someone.    We are awash in regulations that cost vastly more, financially and morally, than they could possibly be worth.  And some that are just plain insulting.

The 55mph speed limit jumps to mind; the interstate system was designed to be travelled safely at 80mph; drivers who are not comfortable at 80 (like me, who is just fine at 65) can feel free to stay in the right lane and keep it over 40.  There were safety improvements – but mainly from the reduction in disparity in speeds, not the speed drop itself.  And very little gas was directly saved by the cut in top speed – gas prices that promoted prudent conservati0n did.

And yet for most of us there is regulation that we can justify; the question is not “whether”, but “can we get the programs and regulation that society objectively needs, without having also to pay for every pet project and, worse, crusade that government and the special interests that pay for it want?

A majority  of Americans and Minnesotans are thankful or at least understand the need for  our governments’ nannying roles.  Most reasonable people would not argue against governmental nannying that:   makes us and our teenagers wear seat belts

Do I argue against it?  No, but mainly due to pointlessness.  A former Jeep driver, I put on my seatbelts as a matter of habit, and I make sure my kids do, and I resent government presuming I don’t.

and makes car manufacturers provide airbags

Perhaps, but I’d pay for them anyway.

tries to prevent oil companies and corporate polluters from destroying the oceans and other environments

Uh oh.  Bad timing, Dane.  Y’see, the bigger the “regulation”, the more temptation for government to tinker with it on behalf of the special interests to whom they report.

The current disaster in the Gulf is a great example of this; pressure from California environmentalists and Malibu property owners like Martin Sheen pressured government into “regulating” drilling out of existence along the California cost, despite huge reserves and shallow water in which disasters like Deepwater Horizon’s could be repaired easily and quickly.  But no – the “regulation” (and similaar ones barring exploration and drilling in other easier-to-reach places) forced oil companies to look for oil in much, much deeper water, with its two-tons-per-square-inch water pressure and the staggering engineering problems that come with it under ideal circumstances, to say nothing of when trying to repair a disaster.

In other words, the root cause of the environmental disaster unfolding in Louisiana is…regulation!  

teaches our children how to read

Regulations and nannying did that?  I thought parents did that. 

My bad!

The principle behind our mostly good and effective governments is that while individual freedoms must be protected, the group is important too.   The collective and democratic wisdom that prohibits littering – and collects taxes to clean up after those who do litter – overrules the wonderful feeling of freedom that comes from throwing your beer can out the window.

Right.  We regulate bad behavior.

It’s just that the more fine-grained the behavior you try to regulate, the higher teh costs get while the less benefit you get for the money.

Great example: Drunk driving.  Preventing people from driving at over .12 or .1 percent blood alcohol level (BAC) brought a huge wave of arrests (revenue!), and a distinct drop in drunk driving fatalities.  Expanding the regulation – dropping the BAC limit to .08 – added to the costs (and, for government, revenues), without actually touching fatalities – because almost no fatalities and very very few accidents of any kind are caused by people with .08 BAC.

So, Dane Smith, let’s go back to your yardstick; if something is outrageous and lethal, there’s a case to be made for regulating it “for society’s good”; people driving with a .14 BAC are clearly a real danger, for example.  

But when you start dropping BACs to .08, you’re not regulating the outrageous and lethal; you’re regulating the borderline-imprudent and generally-innocuous.  At this point all you’re doing is raising revenues via your court system. 

Government should not be a nanny – government should be a cop who prevents the “outrageous and lethal”, but sticks within the rules otherwise. 

Someone whose main purpose is to extort money and serve the interests of her powerful friends isn’t a nanny; it’s a mobster.

By the way, Dane Smith – why are you writing for MPP?  Did someone tell you “squander your credibility”, or what?

Columbia Missouri police SWAT team charges into a house, kills two dogs as the children in the room look on, act like Nazis…

…and find enough pot for a misdemeanor charge.

Two dogs dead, a guy’s house torn apart, and kids traumatized as their watch their pets killed and their parents hauled off in Black Marias cop cars in the middle of the night…

…and for what?   Are “the streets” safer?  No – in fact, I guarantee you the Columbia PD just created two kids who will hate and distrust law enforcement for the rest of their lives.

Are the drug cartels going away?  No – they kill each other off as part of their marketing drives.  A misdemeanor arrest in Missouri isnt’ even background noise.

Our police are becoming more militarized every day – largely to fight a “war” where the fact we can never win is the least of the problems, compared to civil liberties that our idiots overlords are destroying every day to fight it.

Over marijuana.

Billions for fighting real wars.  Not one more penny for this bullshit.

Next time you’re standing barefoot in the TSA line getting a rectal probe and watching them toss your toothpaste and shampoo, just remember – the system sort of barely works, if everything goes right and everyone is lucky as hell:

The Obama administration played down the fact that Shahzad, a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, made it aboard the plane. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say Customs officials prevented the plane from taking off. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the security system has fallback procedures in place for times like this, and they worked.

And Attorney General Eric Holder said he “was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him.”

But it seemed clear the airline either never saw or ignored key information that would kept Shahzad off the plane, a fact that dampened what was otherwise hailed as a fast, successful law enforcement operation.

I’m going to start a website where people can find when Dutch documentary filmmakers are travelling, and on which flight.

But thank heavens for small favors; Secretary Napolitano didn’t order her investigators to drop the search for Taliban sympathizers to focus on the NRA.

I can’t honestly say I have a coherent, consistent opinion about Arizona’s immigration law yet.

On the one hand, there can be no more repugnant thought to a citizen of a free society than the idea of police wandering around going “your papers, please?”. 

On the other hand, that’s not what the Arizona law is about.  According to actual lawyer Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci, who actually has some background in Arizona law, and who noted in my comment section yesterday:

Reasonable suspicion, I think, pertains to searches after an arrest has been effected. The example here being: a cop pulls a guy over for speeding and when the perp opens the car door window, pot smoke billows out. The cop then has reasonable suspicion that there may be pot in the car and can search it without a warrant.

That distinction (if I’m correct) is key to the critical language in the blurb you quote from 11-1051, “Lawful contact”. That term is not defined in Arizona Revised Statutes. However, given the context, I think it may mean a search or arrest pursuant to probable cause. Meaning that the mandate for cops to make a “reasonable effort” to ascertain a person’s immigration status (based on a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality) only kicks in if the person is stopped or arrsted for the violation of some other law.

That said, if I’m wrong and “lawful contact” means merely a cop ambling up to some browish dude with an accent and saying “hey, how ya’ doin’? Papers please,” then this law is repulsive, and proably unconstitutional.

If my interpretation is correct, then a lot of people are getting their panties in a wad over nothing.

To the best of my knowledge, the Arizona law does not mean law enforcment will be driving down the street rounding up brown-looking people who don’t have IDs on them. 

As many proponents of the Arizona law note, the law just reiterates federal law, as it is supposed to be enforced (but isn’t).  I’m no lawyer.  I don’t know. 

On the third hand, there are a lot of people who dont’ really care if you know the real truth or not.  To our nation’s media and current political elites, disinformation is just fine.  Christina Cordova at  “MNSpeak” is part of the disinformation, whether as a producer, a consumer, or both:

A new Arizona law makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally, and requires local law enforcement to ask for papers from anyone they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally — in other words, anyone that “looks” like they “may” not be… a “white” American. Hmm…

If someone can show me the “racial dragnet” portion of this law, please speak up.

On the third-and-a-half hand, we all know that there are cops who will made their collars first and bother with “reasonable” this and “probable” that later, and pretty much assume that nobody’s got the money to fight City Hall anyway.  And that’s usually a fair bet; I know of not a few situations where the police have trampled over ostensible constitutional rights, knowing that the victims weren’t going to be able to do anything about it on their budgets anyway. 

On the fourth hand, that’s a separate issue.  The fact that some cops give ten miles per hour of leeway over the posted speed limit, and some give none at all, doesn’t invalidate the speed limit law.   We need to keep our cops accountable.

On the fifth hand, more enforcement is only part of the answer to the narcotraficante problem.  The “War On Drugs” is a failure by every possible moral, ethical and practical measure.  We need to end it.

On the sixth hand, until we do end it, we have to deal with the hand we’re dealt.  It’d be far better to keep illegal immigrants on the other side of the border.  Perhaps it’s time to abandon the farce of the “open, unfortified border”, and screw the whole idea of a “fence”, and move the Army down there.

On the seventh hand, barring a major commitment in fence-building or a major redeployment of the Armhy, our border is utterly permeable.  And cops in Arizona – and all along the border – are facing an awful situation.  It’s not just would-be landscapers and fry cooks coming across the border.  Once low-crime Phoenix is awash in narcotraficante crime these days.  Trafficers from across the border are causing all kinds of mayhem, and killing not a few innocent Americans who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And the feds are apparently doing nothing useful, and the mainstream media are pretending there is no story, largely because they ideologically support open borders.  Hey, news anchors need cheap nannies too.

On the eighth hand, the illegal immigration problem predates the drug war in Mexico by quite a bit.  The current drug war and the longstanding illegal immigration problem tie into the fact that Mexico is a failed, socialist state, while the US, so far, isn’t.  The open border has allowed Mexico’s failed socialist government to put off its day of reckoning with its own people.

On the ninth hand, to a big chunk of our nation’s political and media elite, the idea of separating ourselves from a neighbor’s failure – even for both country’s mutual good – is noxious.  America is guilty, they think, for much of the hemisphere’s dysfunction, one way or the other.  The whole “the world is one” conceit isn’t just idle talk to them.

And as part of exercising that conceit, there is an epic slander underway.  It’s of a piece with the slander of all dissent that our political aned media elites are engaged in, in which all dissent on any subject is called “racist”, “violent” and otherwise depraved. 

Part of that campaign is the deliberate blurring of the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.  You will never see a lefty commentator, from Christina Cordova to Chris Coleman, use the word “illegal” immigrant when talking about the subject of the law; they never qualify the term “immigrant”, to the point of lying (Coleman’s little squib yesterday about the law affecting his sainted Irish grandmother, who would no doubt kick his ass if she saw the way he was torturing context; every good Irish Catholic gramma knows a lie by omission is a lie just the same).

On the tenth hand, I know of not one single conservative, anywhere, who actually favors clamping down on legal immigration.  “Build a high fence, and a wide gate”, most of us say. 

On the eleventh hand, the media would rather cover peckerwoods waving shotguns from the backs of their pickup trucks, a la “Reno 911″‘s classic “Minutemen” episode, than the actual facts.

So with eleven hands raised, where does that leave us?

Make sure the law is constitutional – as in, “actually follows the law”, as opposed to “makes my white-liberal-guilty heart droop”.

Someone sent me an email about my post from Friday re the Seifert/Emmer DUI flap.  The writer noted that she believed the current laws are hunky-dory, because:

• Alcohol affects people differently; one person might be fine driving with a .08 Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) while another might act, in theory, like Foster Brooks.
• Prudence says that the suspicion of due process we’ve come to accept with DUI arrests – immediate loss of license – is OK.
• The fact that they were arrested is sufficient grounds to know there’s a problem.
• Driving is a privilege, not a right.

The writer had a point about the alcohol imits.  Alcohol affects people differently.  And “laws” require objective measures.  And while we’re being objective, we should note that there is virtually no evidence that BACs below .1 contribute to fatal accidents (other than the fact that the government calls every accident  in which a participant registers a BAC as a “drunk driving accident.  Every one.  If a meteor fell out of the sky on a car driven by someone who’d had three beers in two hours, it’d be called a “drunk driving accident”.  This is done at the behest of groups like MADD, who have become quite unhinged over the years; it’s dishonest at best).

So it’s correct that a BAC level doesn’t tell us everything.  Is the person measuring a .08 after having been a .16 six hours earlier, but is sobering up fast? Is it someone who had four shots in thirty  minutes, and is on her way up to a .18?   Is it a high school kid and inexperience drinker and new driver who had three beers in two hours and is speeding around like Mario Andretti with all sorts of liquid driving skill, or is it a 35 year old experienced driver who is driving just fine but has a broken taillight and runs afoul of a cop who needs to fill his quota?

The question you have to ask yourself is “is the law’s intent to curb drunk driving deaths, or is it to create criminals by criminalizing a fairly common behavior?”   Since there is no objective evidence that casual drinkers with ’08s cause deaths on the highway (that’s all people well north of .1), and the serious problems are most normally caused by repeat offenders who routinely driver well above .1, it’s most likely the latter – especiallly when you consider that the law distinguishes not one iota for the circumstances behind ones’ mild intoxication.  When the sheriffs put up a roadblock and start breathalizying people wholesale and corralling everyone who blows a .08, they’re not asking themselves “is this person on the up or down swing, do they have a history, can they rationally be expected to be a problem”.

No, they’re just racking up the fines.  DUI is  HUGE moneymaker, in fines, whiskeyplate fees, forfeited vehicles, court workloads (requiring more court staff, which feeds bureaucratic empires) and so on.  It’s in the state’s interest to make sure there are more arrests.  Cynically, it means they control more people (which Emmer’s second proposal would have partially rectified); without the cynicsim, it is an amazing amount of money coming in to government and government’s friends, the State Bar.

I was shocked when I wrote about this a few months ago that something close to 10% of Minnesotans have had some kind of drunk driving arrest.   10%?  That’s astounding.  Are 10% of the drivers on the road a danger?  If that were true, none of us should be on the street.

It’s absurd, of course.  Absent any kind of objective data linking .08 BAC with statistically significant numbers of fatalities (to say nothing of being *responsible* for them, which is another whole thing), it’s about nothing more than criminalizing behavior.

The letter from Sandra Berg cast aspersions about Rep. Emmer’s support for two bills in the legislature  last year (18 years after his most recent DUI arrest); one that would allow those accused of drunk driving to keep their licenses under certain circumstances, and another that’d take DUI arrests off the public record after 10 years of good behavior.

Here’s the deal principles are hard.  The thing about a principal is that it can hurt you as well as help you.  Due process and “innocent until proven guilty” are principles,  which most of us agree are good ideas.  But sometimes those principles mean an alleged murderer goes free due to a hung jury.  Ouch.

So when the letter writer writes “I think the arrest is sufficient prima facie grounds for [seizing licenses on arrest rather than conviction]  to be a prudent thing”  – well, isn’t that true for EVERY crime?  Think of what we could do for street crime if we just locked up everyone accused of any crime at all!  Or if we gave cops portable “Field Lethal Injection Kits” to use on accused murderers!

Saying “Driving is a privilege” doesn’t cut it; it’s a privilege that is a vital part of being able to earn a living for most people.  The fact is, in every other crime judges have (per the Fifth Amendment) the right to consider extenuating circumstances in assessing the accused’s circumstances between arraignment and trial; someone accused of five murders who has a twenty year criminal record and a speedboat waiting to take him to Venezuela might not get bail; someone in jail for the first time for having 15 unpaid parking tickets might get sprung for $100 and no other consequences.   Why is drunk driving any different?  Why can someone who got a .08 and has no record at all get the incredible burden of being without a drivers license, the same as someone with a .2 who’s already had several accidents and arrests?

Because a well-heeled, emotionally manipulative pressure group has made due process an unfashionable principle, that’s why.

So here’s the question; do you believe in the principles of due process and innocence until proven guilty by court and jury?  Or do you only believe in it for crimes where there is no  emotional baggage attached?

Walter Scott Hudson writes on the subject.

As part of my continuing examination of my extremism – because Janet Napolitano believes that as a conservative pro-life low-tax second-and-tenth-amendment activist, I must be an extremist – let’s look at our culture.

“Culture” is a huge topic, and it’s hard to even define where the left and right diverge, or on what each side actually believes, to say nothing of what their opponents believe.

For example, one of the putative big battles in the “culture war” twenty years ago was the campaign by Tipper Gore, wife of then-future lisping fraud and Vice President Algore, to put warnings on music that had “offensive” lyrics.   Was it conservative?  Was it liberal?

Perhaps a little bit of both – and who cares?  Because while that particular argument, like many, mixed elements of both sides of the aisle – conservatives fretting about the downfall of civilization, liberals  about the system that’d make young males write the kind of rap and metal lyrics that’d make them be so antisocial in the first place – it was fairly irrelevant.

Because while there are many facets to what both conservatives and liberals believe what our culture is, and what is should be, it really boils down to two major differences of opinion:

• Conservatives believe that our society is a free association of equals who create a government that governs by consent of the people, and should generally operate within restrictive boundaries – the Tenth Amendment, for a quick example.  Liberals believe that society is – I’ve heard an amazing number of liberals use this exact description – a parent, riding herd on his/her unruly or needy children, trying to help them grow up to be good citizens, kissing their owwies and putting them in time-out and keeping them out of trouble until they’re ready to take over for themselves.
• Conservatives believe that while mankind is deeply imperfect and utterly imperfectible, the concept of the United States is in and of itself one of immense nobility; it is a “shining city on a hill”, a place where government is a useful subordinate to the nobility of the individual.  It’s an ideal toward which most of the world – the sane part – aspires.   Liberals tend to believe that our society is perfectible, through the graces of a benevolent government rather than any intrinsic virtue in the American system.

Now, the battle is usually expressed through an endless series of group ad homina; liberals slur “Tenthers” as advocates of slavery; conservatives see liberals as hive creatures, Borg with no identity outside the larger organism.

At any rate – I believe that America works best when we not only do see ourselves as a free association of equals, but act like it.  And when government limits itself, rather than  you or me.

Yep.  I’m a radical!

According to Janet Napolitano and most of the mainstream media, I’m an “extremist”; I’m pro-life, anti-tax, pro-Second-and-Tenth Amendment…

…which, to some, means “anti-government”; as if “wanting just the parts of government we really need” is in some way the same as wanting the government to be overthrown.

Here’s one of my “extremist” beliefs; that the government that governns best, governs least.  Of course, that was really Thomas Jefferson – who, let’s never forget, was also an extremist.

Look – most of the case for limited government boils down to this:  The Constitution really defines what government is supposed to do; defend the nation, look out for the “general welfare”, raise taxes for federal functions (which at one point meant “functions that were properly the province of the Feds, although that’s been bastardized beyond recognition for the past couple of generations),  sign treaties with foreign governments, interpret the Constitution and, since the end of the Civil War, make sure that “equality before the law” is a unform, national thing; above all, per the Tenth Amendment, to keep its hands off of everything else.

But you can hear that from the entire Libertarian Party, and a fair chunk of the libertarian wing of the GOP; that’s Conservatism 101 (or, if you’re talking with Keith Olberman or Nancy Pelosi or Janet Napolitano, “extremism”, but I digress).

There’s another, ethical reason to limit the size and power of government.  It does in unbendable fact what capitalism supposedly does; it arbitrarily picks winners.

Imagine that you’re a barber.  You live in, let’s say, Portland, Oregon, a city with nine other barbers.  Now, being plagued with hippies, it’s not the best town to be a barber.  But you get word that the guys from Phish are going to all get flattops; knowing what a bunch of “non-conformists” hippies are, you and your nine fellow barbers are getting ready for an avalanche of business.

As one of your items of business, you set up a PAC – call it “Portland Cares about Hair”.  You publicize photos of bad flat-tops.  “Portland must demand better”, the ads say.  And you go before the Portland City Commissariat Council, and convince them that bad flat-tops are something that government must prevent – so they should impose a license on the barber trade, with licenses going to would-be barbers who have passed a license exam issued by the “Board of Barber Examiners” – a panel of three barbers drawn from among the ten of you.  Which means that, as the hordes of hippies wander about looking for flat-tops, there are only ten shops to go to; all of the hippies who try to start their own barber shops are busted by the cops and fined for “barbering without a license”.

In other words, you and your nine barber friends have just used government to give you a better, more commanding market position.

Business does this all the time; the bigger the business, the bigger the likelihood they’ll get government to clamp down on the market for them:

Yes, that’s the largest investment bank on Wall Street calling for stricter regulation from Washington. Stoll has a pretty straightforward explanation:

What [Goldman CEO Lloyd] Blankfein and Mr. Cohn are now saying is that their desire for higher capital requirements isn’t related to concern about their ability to control Goldman‘s risk-taking (“Please, Mr. Government, supervise me more closely, allow me to borrow less money, and force me to take less risk”), but their ability to assess and judge the risks of their counterparties, the other firms they are doing deals with.

Why should Goldman have to pay for mitigating the risk of its deal-partners when the SEC or the Fed can do Goldman’s work for it — on the taxpayer dime?

This is further evidence of what I’ve been saying for months: just as tobacco regulation was a gift to Philip Morris, toy regulation was a gift to Mattel, and health-care “reform” was a gift to Big Pharma, financial reform will improve Goldman’s profitability, Obama’s populist rhetoric notwithstanding.

Government has no more business picking winners than it has defining who shall lose.  At least, it shouldn’t.

I know.  What an extremist I am.

The greatest fear of a genuine conservative is government inflicting too much power on society.  The greatest fear of a genuine liberal is that government lacks the size and power to govern society.

Hold those thoughts.  We’ll come back to them.

———-

There are a lot of reasons to distrust government.  The least of them is that nothing guarantees it will ever be able to help you when you need it.

It’s happened.  Katrina, of course, was a debacle.  Before that?  It took only a videotaped beating and an unpopular “innocent” verdict to turn one of our major cities into a war zone – one from which government withdrew, leaving the citizens to the mercy of the mob and to their own devices.

And the most inspiring scene from that entire miserable episode was that of Korean shop owners, armed with their own rifles and shotguns, patrolling their storefronts and rooflines, bringing order to anarchy.  As stores burned all around them, they and their property remained safe – because when government couldn’t safeguard them, they did it for themselves. 

I saw that, and I damn near cried.  It was beautiful – the silhouette of an American citizen with a rifle, doing what big, stupid government can’t, drawing the metaphorical line in the sand and saying “You, evil, shall not pass”, and facing down the mob, and on their little corner or in front of their little store, winning.

They were the militia.

Not the idiot nutslaps in Michigan who are serving as the media and left’s current boogeymen on the subject.

Indeed, we all are.  That’s the law.  The Second Amendment says so – boiled down to 21st century parlance, it says “since freedom needs to be defended, the people shall have the right to own guns, and use them”.   Heller declared that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” means “you and me, the law-abiding citizens”.   God willing, McDonald will say “and it means the same thing in ever corner, nook and cranny of the union”.    It is the duty of every law-abiding citizen who pays more than lip service to liberty to own a gun and be proficient with it.

Now, go back to that first section.  The great difference between liberals and conservatives is the question “who’s in charge”. 

Last year during the Tea Parties, much of the media and about half the nation  got the victorian vapours over a few reports that Tea Partiers had brought firearms to the rallies.   And it was instructive to see peoples’ reactions to the news that nobody got arrested, because in the jurisdictions involved, it was perfectly legal.

About half the country rolled their heads in horror; “what if someone had shot somebody?”  Some even suggested that the possibility that one of these law-abiding armed citizens would step out of line was cause to restict the Second Amendment.

The other half went “Well, duh!”.  They know that the law-abiding citizen is a law-abiding citizen, whether he’s carrying a wrist rocket or an M14 or a flamethrower for that matter.  Our rights, they know, front and center in the heart of their soul, are not dependent on what our dumbest neighbors might do!.

To the liberal, a citizen who believes society is a free association of equals who consent to be governed, and who believe that consent must be earned, and who arms himself to reinforce the point, is threatening; “who governs him?”, the liberal asks.  The conservative responds “Unless I’ve actually broken a law?  I do!”.   That defies the liberal’s vision for what “society” is.

Tough.

The arrests of nine “[insert inflammatory catchphrase here]” “Christian Militia” members in Michigan have focused America’s attention the American media and those who still pay attention to it on the “problem” of “militias” which, by the way, have been shrinking since their heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s.

During the 90s, “militias” became the Democrat boogeyman, after a number of well-publicized and very ugly incidents; the Medina shootout, the Ruby Ridge massacre, and of course the Oklahoma City bombing.  Under fire during his first term before his epic setback in the ’94 elections, the Clinton Administration sought to distract the nation with a huge, sinister, conspiratorial internal enemy, the “militia movement”; the 1994 Crime Bill, larded with civil rights violations that dwarfed much of what had the left up in arms during the Bush administration, was at least partly in response to this huge “movement”…

…that, except for the actions of Timothy McVeigh (who, says the government, was not acting as part of a huge shadowy conspiracy), had almost no affect on crime or any other area of life in the US – certainly not as compared to the “war on drugs”, which was a product of a perfect storm of social engineering from both the right (“drugs are bad”) and the left (decades of welfare dependence and warehousing the poor in the inner city).

At any rate, even though the numbers of people involved in the lefty boogeyman version of “militias” was never big, and has dropped since the nineties, the image that the left propagates – paunchy, hate-clogged, drawling,  white rednecks in camouflage with AK-47s – is a control panel full of hot buttons for the left, purpose-designed to scare – is back, for the moment at least, bigger and badder than ever. 

Because with a Tea Party afoot across the land and the President’s poll numbers falling faster than Hillary Duff’s career bell curve, there are lots of center-to-left voters to be scared back into line.

And fear’s first cousin is ignorance.  I’m getting deja vu all over again from the comments, the blog posts, the talk show calls; the left is duly frightened of the great, unwashed horde (and the tiny, unconvicted band that was the excuse for the left to declare “militias” the boogeyman of the month again). 

It reminds me of something I wrote two years ago about the 25th anniversary of the Medina Shootout, and Hollywood’s reflections on all those crazy people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre:

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (”Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance. 

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”’s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

It was nonsense, of course – and, like the “militia” mania that served to distract parts of America from Bill Clinton’s foibles, and is being rolled out now to distract us from Obama’s economy, and scare “moderates” into line behind The One, it’s a cynical lie.

More tomorow.

Now, again, kids, don’t be violent.  We’re going to get rid of this administration – or at least neuter it – at the polls.  There’s no need for all sorts of foamy-mouthed Kossing, here.

I say that because, naturally, if I don’t someone will accuse me of grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods, ready to shoot at revenooers.

At any rate, yay for federal law enforcement and all, and goodnesss knows that’s going to come out at trial, but if the news reports are any indication, Big Sis has just “protected” us from the Keystone Militia:

In an indictment unsealed Monday, prosecutors said the group began military-style training in the Michigan woods in 2008, learning how to shoot guns and make and set off bombs.

Shooting guns?  You mean, like 50% of the American people do?

David Brian Stone, 44, of Clayton, Mich., and one of his sons were identified as the ringleaders of the group. Stone, who was known as “Captain Hutaree,” organized the group in paramilitary fashion and members were assigned secret names, prosecutors said. Ranks ranged from “radoks” to “gunners,” according to the group’s Web site.

I’m going to guess they had a secret handshake, to help them tell who was the mole, too.

Prosecutors said Stone had identified certain law enforcement officers near his home as potential targets. He and other members discussed setting off bombs at a police funeral, using a fake 911 call to lure an officer to his death, killing an officer after a traffic stop, or attacking the family of an officer, according to the indictment.

Now, when I first read that bit – that the “militia” planned to draw law enforcement into a huge ambush – I thought “this could have been a serious bunch of people”.  That’s a classic asymmetric tactic.

Why, in the hands of a ruthless, competent insurgency…

After such attacks, the group allegedly planned to retreat to “rally points” protected by trip-wired explosives for a violent standoff with the law.

…oh.  Never mind.

No confirmation on whether they planned to paint huge targets on their foreheads, or go into action with central lines already inserted for the lethal injections.

Hutaree says on its Web site its name means “Christian warrior” and describes the word as part of a secret language that few are privileged to know.

Secret languages.

Oddball internal rituals and ranks.

Inscrutably bobbleheaded strategy.

Janet Napolitano just rounded up the Scientologists.

Of course, this is no laughing matter; threatening to “levy war” is a big deal.

And it’s even less a laughing matter that our government feels the need to make a huge splash over Captain Hutaree and his Christian Avengers at a time when Congress’ Democratic Caucus is actively slandering dissenters with an overwrought, and curiously coordinated, campaign of finding “violence” and “threats” and “racism” under every rock (for which, somehow, no indictments exist; also evidence, other than the kind of thing every dogcatcher and sports reporter in America gets as part of the job).

Fearless prediction:  Look for a brow-furrowing “investigation” of “militias” by Ann Curry.

Stat.

UPDATE: Let me be clear, here.  The Hutarees seem to have been amateurs – but amateurism is no defense when it comes to charges of conspiracy to murder anyone, much less cops.  The Fort Dix Six were amateurs, and they’re in jail – justifiably so.  Major Hassan (and every other mass-murderer, for that matter) was an amateur, but that doesn’t make his victims any less dead.

My beef isn’t with the FBI or the Feds for investigating or arresting them. 

It’s with the media and the Dems (pardon the redundancy), which seem to be using this episode as part of an ongoing smear of all right-wing dissent.  Last night the local news ran a report about “the militia and Hate Groups in the Twin Cities”; it focused on a doughy guy in a house in Apple Valley who ran a white-supremacist online bookstore.  

And it’s with the Southern Guilt By Association Poverty Law Center being taken seriously as a source on the subject again.  It’s Janet Napolitano’s watchlist, and hordes of semi-literate leftybloggers chanting “Avalance of Violence!  Avalanche of Violence!” like a bunch of demented macaws.

It’s that there are so many smears, happening in so brief a time, so closely tied to an epochal, divisive political event.

That’s the beef.

Free speech is just too edgy for Canada:

Coulter said she has been speaking regularly at university campuses for a decade. While she has certainly been heckled, she said this is the first time a speaking engagement has had to be cancelled because of protesters.

“This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university,” she said.

Anyone who can make Havana Denny Dease look like a stalwart of civil liberty has got serious problems.

Coulter remarked on the reception she has had since entering the country.

“Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council, so welcome to Canada!”

I may have to put that 0n my bucket list too. 

That, and being Olberman’s “worst person”.  That’d be fun.

As noted on Tuesday, I’m an extremist – at least, according to the DFL, most of the Strib’s columnists and, apparently, Janet Napolitano.  This is the second of a seven-part series exploring just how extreme I am, and what being an “extremist” really means in society today.

The first and foremost reason I’m an “extremist” is that I believe in Liberty.

But what is liberty, exactly?

Liberty sounds simple, at least on the surface.  Liberty means You Have Rights. Of course, the left and the right believe in rights; a conservative believes that these rights are inalienable, endowed to us by our creator (whether God or Biology or Vishnu or a remarkable physical coincidence); a “progressive” might believe that, or that they are the output of a benign government that works in the peoples’ best interests.  Either way, nobody argues that we have the right (from whatever source) to speak, publish, assemble, worship, privacy and security in our persons and possessions, due process and vote; guns and abortion are contentions that I won’t argue here.

And for a conservative, “liberty” involves having the government keep its appetites under control, so that I have more of the “fruits of my labor” – money – for me and my family.  Larry Pogemiller’s assertions aside, I do know how to use it better than he does.  I’d also appreciate the liberty to defend myself, my family and my neigbhorhood from criminals, and it’d be great if government would quit diddling about with censorship.

But that’s the easy part.  Everyone agrees on most of those.

But what is “Liberty?”

———-

In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 classic Blue, Juliette Binoche finds herself “free”.  And it sucked.

Blue, mind you, was the first part of Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy (White and Red completed the set), a three-film series based on the colors of the French (and, by the way, American) flag.  Each installment was based on a color, and its meaning; Liberte (Blue), Egalite, or Equality (White) and Fraternite, or Brotherhood (Red).

Liberte came to Binoche’s character, Julie De Courcy, early in the film; a young mother and wife of a noted composer, Mr. De Courcy accidentally swerved off a road and smacked into a tree, killing himself and their young daughter.  Binoche’s De Courcy survived – and then had to deal, not only with surviving, but dealing with real, true “Freedom”.   Julie discovered that Liberte – genuine freedom – is not just the right to do what you want, but something that has huge, sometimes unintended, sometimes very difficult effects on everyone involved with her.  Julie De Courcy spends a good chunk of the film trying to ensure she never again experiences the pain she felt in losing her husband and child – one of life’s most epic “failures” – and found that it was impossible.  Or, rather, that one loses more by preventing failure than by failing.  (It’s a fantastic movie, by the way – one of my ten favorite of all time.  It’s not your typical Hollywood fare, though; it doesn’t even qualify as typical French fare.  Kieślowski was an interesting character himself.  But more on him, and his films, some other time).

Liberty is not just the freedom to do what you want; it’s the freedom to screw up royally.

It’s that last part that’s the problem.

Failure is hard.  Nobody likes it.  It hurts.  Sometimes, it’s disastrous.

And averting disaster – cheating the idea of failure, on a personal and societal level – is a key part of “progressivism”, which believes that human failure, or at least many of them, can be ameliorated, prevented or outlawed.  In ways small (campus speech codes) and large (the welfare state), “progressivism” tries to insulate people from failures small (being offended) and large (wanting for material necessities).

But failure is a key part of improving the human condition.  People, as individuals, learn more from failure than from success.

And what happens to a person who is never allowed to fail?  Exactly what society is learning today as the children of a generation of “helicopter parents”, insulated from serious consequences for much of anything from falling off bikes to losing baseball games to failing classes, grows up unmotivated and glutted with unearned “self-esteem” and utterly unaware of how to fail, and thus how to really learn.

The same goes for societies.   After every epic failure of capitalism has come the “creative destruction” that comes at the crossroads of enlightened self-interest and learning from failure; that, in turn, leads to success.  Or more failure.  And the cycle continues.

And societies efforts to outlaw failure (beyond the utterly necessary efforts to prevent starvation and abject misery) have backfired.  The unintended consequences of outlawing failure are worse, in many ways and in the long term, than the pain that society tried to prevent in the first place.  Generations of comprehensive welfare have led a huge subculture that seems incapable of surviving without government help (or so they seemed; welfare reform efforts, in states that implemented them, turned the pathology around, just like letting your kids sink or swim will reverse excessive dependence on you); trying to prevent a segment of society from “failing” to own houses helped lead to an epic market distortion that led to the recession/depression we’re in today.

Failure is not only a fact of life; it’s not just sometimes a good thing; failure is, in fact, essential to development, whether you’re developing a child, a business, an economy or a society.

True liberty, really, is the freedom to fail (although not the freedom to maliciously or criminally inflict the consequences of your failure on other people) and, then, to learn from the failures, to fail again, to rise, to fall, and rise again – each time just a little better, if you’re doing your job right.

To bottle that up – to ban failure – is to ban true success.

And that’s what I support – the human right, the “liberty”, to fail and to succeed on one’s merits.

Yep.  I’m an extremist.