Joe Bodell at MN “Progressive” Project, in the tradition of those great Americans Frank Burns and Dwight Schrute, wants to know; “did you go, or have you ever been, to a Tea Party?”

At what point does society recognize that an elected leader’s public speech has crossed the line into the territory of sedition?

About two seconds before it crosses into “witchcraft”.

Oh, give me a break.  It’s as serious as anything else in Bodell’s point.

Wikpedia’s definition:

{{facepalm}}

(Note:  When someone leads off an “argument” with a dictionary definition of a word, they are insulting you.  When they lead off the “argument” with a definition from Wikipedia, they are insulting themselves.  And you).

I digress…

Sedition is a term of law which refers to overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority as tending toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel. A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.

The answer is simple, Joe.  “Sedition” is a “crime” that gets trotted out to criminalize dissent, and bully people into compliance, acquiescence and silence.

For example, if I say “Keith Ellison is a brittle, vindictive little man who is more suited to teaching Grievance Studies at a community college than representing a great city like Minneapolis in Washington, and I urge you to vote against him”, and the “local authority” in Mr. Bodell’s Wikipedia reference (sknx) “deems” it to be rabble-rousing, and has perverted the laws to make “sedition” illegal, they could sic the goons on me.

Glad I could help.

Fortunately, our “local authority” is bound by the Constitution, whose First Amendment protects my right to have an opinion about Keith Ellison just as much as it does the right to make statues of the Virgin Mary out of dung, or Joe Bodell’s right to pass off McCarthyistic misapplications of archaic, authoritarian laws as “reasoning”.

Or Michele Bachmann’s right to get a crowd whipped up against Joe Bodell’s government:

Just this past weekend, Michele Bachmann spoke at a Tea Party rally in St. Paul, saying

“But mark my words, the American people aren’t gonna take this lying down,” Bachmann later said. “We aren’t gonna play their game, we’re not gonna pay their taxes. They want us to pay for this? Because we don’t have to. We don’t have to. We don’t have to follow a bill that isn’t law. That’s not the American way, and that’s not what we’re going to do.”

After which she told people to go into the woods with Grampa’s Garand and start shooting revenooers?

Well, no.  The Representative was calling people to “resist” at the ballot box and at Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings (assuming we haven’t seen the last of them) and on the phones.

Which is still legal, by Joe Bodell’s leave.

An MPP reader happened to be in the neighborhood of that rally, and noted that there appeared to be many more Wisconsin license plates nearby than one normally sees in St. Paul.

(Huh?  First – does Joe Bodell ever spend time in Saint Paul?  Second – and I repeat; huh?)

Curious. In any case, I’m fairly certain that if Congress passes a bill…and the President signs it (despite those same Republicans playing footsie with the crazies who fervently believe him not to be a natural-born American citizen), the bill. becomes. law.

(And goodness knows one must not play footsie with people with bizarre fringe views, must one?  Because having fringies and other lunatics show up at ones’ party sure destroys ones’ credibility, doesn’t it?)

Anyone care to disagree?

I’d raise my hand here, but I’m afraid Joe Bodell will call the State Patrol or something.

OK, Joe, it’s fairly simple.  If a bill. becomes. law, I get to work to change it, in the Legislature, and/or by changing the legislature.

But if it walks like a duck and talks like a seditionist, at what point do we call the damned thing one thoroughly seditionist waterfowl?

It’s simple, Joe.  You can call it “sedition”.  You can even call together a group – call it the “Minnesota Anti-American Activities Project” hearings, if you’d like – and have them declare it anything you want.  Call it sedition, or witchcraft for that matter. And the rest of us will do what Americans do whenever people do that kind of thing.  Laugh at it, and maybe come up with a snappy term for trying to criminalize dissent.  “Bodellism”, perhaps?

Nah.

It just seems like that invoking a term that was last used as an authoritarian and not-very-constitutional infringement on civil liberty in 1918 is something you do when you don’t have a very good factual argument.

The problem with gun control – one of the reasons that it’s finally stiffing with the American people – is that it burdens the law-abiding citizen for the crimes of society’s low-lifes.  It’s one of the reasons America is rejecting gun control; Real Americans can’t abiding punishing those who’ve done no wrong.

Hopefully that same impulse will swallow up this moronic idea:

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill are proposing a new national biometric ID card that would be required of all U.S. workers. WSJ’s Laura Meckler explains the proposal and the objections from privacy advocates.Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

In other words, force each individual American to validate him/herself, rather than deal with the real problems – open borders, and a socialist neighbor whose economy resembles what ours will

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/588e8cae-2d48-11df9c5b-00144feabdc0.html

Yet again, a cure that’s much worse than the disease.

…but this bit here  is music to my ears.

A majority of Americans now believe the Fed is the greatest threat to their rights:

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal governments become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

On the one hand, this is good news; it’s a sign that Obama’s mandate to use government to “change” and “bring hope” has dissipated.

A Camden, NJ cop on vacation with his developmentally-disabled son is told by TSA staff at the Philly airport to  remove the kid’s leg brace:

The Thomases were dumbfounded. “I told them he can’t walk without them on his own,” Bob Thomas said.

“He said, ‘He’ll need to take them off.’ ”

Ryan’s mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic.

No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own.

Leona Thomas said she was calm. Bob Thomas said he was starting to burn.

I was amazed to see that it worked.

They complied, and Leona went first, followed by Ryan, followed by Bob, so the boy wouldn’t be hurt if he fell. Ryan made it through.

By then, Bob Thomas was furious. He demanded to see a supervisor. The supervisor asked what was wrong.

This is normally the part of the story where TSA pulls the hapless traveller aside and throws him in jail.  Because everyone knows terrorists get angry at being told to jump through stupid hoops.

It helped that Mr. Thomas is a cop.

Thomas said he told the supervisor he was going to file a report, and at that point the man turned and walked away.

A Philadelphia police officer approached and asked what the problem was. Thomas said he identified himself and said he was a Camden officer. The Philadelphia officer suggested he calm down and enjoy his vacation.

Perhaps the 4-year-old boy was on a watch list of some kind? Having been born, he was obviously a pro-lifer and all…

And we thought TV weatherpeople overreacted to snowstorms.

King, North Carolina slapped on some amazing, draconian – and utterly irrelevant – restrictions during their recent round of flurries, imposing a curfew, banning alcohol sales, and banning the sale of firearms and ammunition, or possession of either off of one’s property.

In other words, they declared a police state. Over snow.

It’s over – sort of. Mayor Frank Burns and Police Chief Dwight Shrute have lifted some of the restricti0ns:

Authorities lifted a curfew and alcohol restrictions in King on Sunday, but said a state of emergency declaration remained in effect until Monday.

Authorities said the state of emergency declaration would continue until Monday 9 a.m., barring any unforeseen circumstances or severe changes.

OK, I was pulling your legs about the Burns and Shrute bit. Not that it isn’t fully appropriate.

The rest of it, though?

Effective Sunday afternoon, alcohol restrictions and a curfew were lifted. All other remaining restrictions would continue until Monday, said Paula May, King police chief.

Other restrictions include a ban on the sale or purchase of any type of firearm, ammunition, explosive or any possession of such items off a person’s own premises.

Also on Sunday, the emergency shelter established by the American red Cross at West Stokes High School was closed.

“We appreciate the support and cooperation of everyone with our efforts to keep the citizens of King safe,” May said.

Well, to be fair to the citizens of King, it sounds like if they didn’t “support and cooperate”, they might have wound up spending the weekend in an emergency shelter of a different kind.

Anyone know where a guy can contribute to a campaign to recall Hauptmann “Chief” May?

Third parties have been palookaville for a lot of good and important – and not a few stupid and bad – ideas in American history.

The Grangers, the Non-Partisan League, the Libertarian Party, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, the Greens, the Reform Ventura “Independence” Party and many more movements and movers have grandiloquently decided that they needed a party of their own…

…which, once the followers’ original fervor cooled, became a marginalized non-entity.

Which isn’t to say third parties haven’t had their effects.  Ross Perot probably put Bill Clinton into office.  Ralph Nader probably returned the favor in 2000.  A swelling of Libertarian sentiment helped push the 1994 “Contract with America”.

Now, the most powerful force in American politics today (after the Teachers’ Unions) is the Tea Party movement.  And as a group of ‘partiers gathers in Nashville, some are pondering the idea of starting a third, “Tea” Party – because neither of the major parties is just right for the Tea Party, or so they say.

Which is not only a bad idea in the long term – see above – but tosses away the Tea Parties’ biggest advantage.

Mark Tapscott:

Third parties have mostly failed thanks to immense institutional ballot access obstacles erected by the two major parties, and the challenge of overcoming geographic separation over vast differences in order to achieve timely concerted action.

But the Internet enables these new armies rapidly to overcome distance and resource limitations that would hobble a traditional third-party attempt, and instead focus effectively on bringing to bear consistent demands with widespread public support on decision makers.

They can also, if they choose and organize to do so, impose enduring consequences on recalcitrant or witless decision makers, as Martha Coakley found out a few weeks ago in Massachusetts.

The Tea Parties, being a decentralized movement that depends less on big top-down direction and more on ubiquitous communication and decentralized grassroots action, have a huge advantage that would get squandered by forming a third party:

The issue then for Tea Partiers and political elites alike was posed by [Instapundit blogger Glenn] Reynolds in a recent Examiner article: When political movements can “bubble up from below, and self-organize via the Internet, what will happen to the political class?”

Going the traditional third-party route will lead Tea Partiers to a dead end. Taking over the GOP probably should be pursued in any case, but even if successful would only win half the battle and likely would be temporary in any case.

Why settle for half a victory when Tea Partiers have within their grasp as an independent third force to be the decisive influence in both major political parties?

The Tea Parties could very well take over the GOP.

But when I spoke at the Tax Day Tea Party, I made a point of asking the crowd “what party do you belong to?  Raise your hand if you’re a…”, and I riffed through the list of parties.  And people who didn’t care about parties at all.  The biggest round of applause were Republicans, with “A pox on all their houses” second – and behind that, plenty of DFLers.

The Tea Parties aren’t affiliated with parties.  That’s a strength (I add some emphasis):

There is no mystery about what most Tea Partiers seek — a limited, transparent government that listens to them and resists ideologues with millennial blueprints to remake America in their own image, minimal taxation and regulation, strong national defense, and an unapologetic commitment to American exceptionalism abroad.

Tea Partiers should seek out or field candidates in both major parties who support those aims and do everything possible to elect them, then hold their feet to the fire of accountability. Just imagine a bipartisan Tea Party Caucus with sufficient numbers in Congress to drive the national agenda.

That could be a conquering army like none before in American politics.

Which is, of course, exactly what the Tea Party – and the country – need.

Remember ten years and two months ago?

The world was waiting for the calendar to flip over to 2000; more importantly, we waited to see if the world’s computers would shut down, with drastic results (most of them didn’t).

And as the rest of us celebrated the new Millennium, always on the periphery of things was a thin little film of nerdy, adenoidal pedants clucking away, their voices like Comic Store Guy in “The Simpsons”; “Er, helLO?  There was no Year Zero; the Millennium doesn’t begin until 2001″.  These people – most of them frustrated wannabe scientists who worked at petty government jobs or as office temps – were largely and justly ignored.

The point?  Keep your technicalities; there’s a larger point here.  We’ celebrated the end of a thousand years of years beginning with “1” (and, for all of us in IT, the end of the biggest crash preventive maintenance job in IT history, so far).

The other point – the one I’m writing about today?  Pedants who huff and phumpher about petty technicalities often miss the forest for the trees.

Such is Jeff Van Wychen at liberal think tank “MN2020”, who recycles the hottest non-story of April 2009 among the lefty clucking classes; he’s T fussing about the purported misuse of history by the “Tea Party” Movement.

An image used by the modern tea party movement shows colonial patriots dressed as American Indians dumping tea off of ships into the Boston harbor in December of 1773.  When it comes to selecting a signature event, today’s “tea partiers” have chosen poorly.  The tax protests of modern tea partiers have nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

Van Wychen – whose organization exists largely to misappropriate facts for partisan ends – certainly has the textbook story of the Boston Tea Party

The impetus behind the Boston Tea Party was the Tea Act of 1773.  In response to colonial outrage, Parliament repealed most of the taxes imposed through the Townshend Act of 1767.  However, the hated tax on tea was left in place as a demonstration of Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies.  Irate colonists would have none of it.  Tea laden ships were not allowed to land in New York and Philadelphia.  In Boston, tea was taken from the ships and dumped overboard.

Which caused the good folks at “MA1820” to post handbills sniffing that they weren’t unrepresented, since His Highness George III was charged by Almighty God to represent them.

Well, no, I’m not being especially facetious.  We’ll come back to that.

The outrage of the colonists was not about the price that they were forced to pay for tea because of tax; in fact, the price of tea declined in the American colonies as a result of the Tea Act because the East India Company was allowed to directly export tea to the colonies rather than having to go through middlemen in London.  The rage of the colonists was not about the amount of the tax; rather, they objected to the principle of any tax imposed upon them by government officials that they had no voice in choosing.

Modern tea partiers can make no such claim of “taxation without representation.”

Maybe, maybe not.

Van Wychen and everyone who chants the “Tea Party is bad history!” meme are wrong for two reasons.

The first:  When I accuse Jeff Van Wychen of being a “Wet Blanket” who “doesn’t have a leg to stand on”, and that my response to his point will “knock his socks off” and “drive him up the wall”?  What do you see?

Someone reading that could, in theory, read that and wonder if Mr. Van Wychen is an amputee made from soggy wool, and that the impact of my rhetoric will literally leave him barefoot and wedged up against the ceiling.  But that someone would have had to have learned English from a 100 year old textbook in the jungles of Burma, because each of those terms has assumed different, non-literal meanings in American English.

So too with “Tea Party”.  The Boston Tea Party was indeed a historical event – but the term Tea Party has had an idiomatic meaning, referring to any group of plucky underdogs taking a symbolic stance against big, distant, uncaring government.  And until the Tea Party Movement made every leftist in America into a pointillistic historical pedant, even they understood it.  And indeed, they do today – but the mission of left-leaning “think” tanks like MN2020 is to try to discredit the opposition.  And so it goes.

But just for laughs, let’s hew to the literal, historical story of the Boston Tea Party.

Van Wychen:

At the federal level and in all 50 states, taxes are imposed by elected representatives.  You might not have voted for the current officeholders, but you still had the opportunity to vote.  Americans and Minnesotans today are taxed with representation.  Thus, there is no connection between modern tax protesters and the patriots who dumped tea into the Boston harbor nearly twelve score years ago.

This is reminiscent of Mr. Van Wychen’s colleague John Fitzgerald’s claim last summer that public schools were more accountable than charter schools, because public schools have elected boards.  I read that claim, and then compared my own kids’ charter school – where the board responds to 200-odd parents, is mostly turned-over every year, and is the launching point for nobody’s political career – with the Saint Paul School Board, which spends half a billion dollars a year, does a terrible job, and can only be gotten onto with the aid of the Teachers’ Union and the DFL and an awful lot of money.  Am I “represented” on the Saint Paul School Board, to which I pay more and more taxes every year?  In theory.   Am I better-represented there than on my charter’s board?  Don’t be an idiot.

Oh, there is an elected Saint Paul School Board.  But as a political minority in a one-party town, the only vote that really mattered in the end was my protest vote – pulling my kids out of the Saint Paul Public Schools, forever.

Now, I’ve spoken at two Tea Parties.  And the Tea Parties are really quite extraordinary events, gathering people from all political parties, and no political party at all, together with one big thought in mind; get government back under control.

And those people feel like an awful lot of fiscal conservatives felt over the past eight years; the same way we Saint Paul conservative parents feel at school board election time; that we may have an elected official out there sent from our districts who passes all sorts of legislation, but we – the people who favor fiscal responsibility – really aren’t represented at all.

And so we exercise our First Amendment right to protest, to try to change that elected government.  And we’re doing it under the banner of an idiom that, let’s be honest, everyone understands.  Just as everyone understood that 2000 was the Millennium that everyone really cared about.

And – mirabile dictu – it’s working, or starting to; Democrats are running scared, Mr. Brown is going to Washington and Mr. Christie has gone to Trenton and pretty soon Messrs Reid and Dorgan will be going back to Reno and Bismarck.

Which prompted the Big Left into a paroxysm of juvenile name-calling, and, today, inveigled Jeff Van Wychen to play history teacher.

Modern tea partiers have constitutionally protected free speech rights.  Indeed, a fact-based debate over taxation is healthy and should be encouraged

By your leave, my liege.  And that is exactly what we are doing!

.  However, those who advocate for low taxes and less public investment should not misappropriate historic events that have nothing to do with the cause they espouse.

Have a beer, Jeff.  The debate is fact-based, and the Tea Party idiom is perfectly well understood; everyone with an IQ above plant life knows it, just as they knew “Remember  Pearl Harbor” meant “shoot Germans and Japanese, build weapons, support the war”, rather than “sit and commemorate”.

Nor should they pretend to be any more patriotic than the rest of us.

I’m not sure if anyone actually has – and I doubt Mr. Van Wychen is, either.  I think that’s just become one of those strawmen liberals throw in to make sure we know they’re victims, too.

Craig Westover also tossed Mr. Van Wychen into the rhetorical harbor which, lest Mr. Van Wychen get upset, I hasten to add that I’ve qualified with the term “rhetorical”; Mr. Van Wychen need neither don a Speedo nor find a beach towel.

All over the Internet this morning, liberal commentators are bemoaning the idea that “41>59” – that now that the Brown victory denies the Dems the ability to force cloture on filibusters (barring the not-entirely-unlikely prospect of flipping someone like an Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins).

“Nowhere in the Constitution is this mentioned” they plaintively whine.

Either is the recipe for Senate Navy Bean Soup; it’s a tradition.  So is the idea of cloture.  It’s a rule the Senate adopted, largely in keeping with its own mission to be the deliberative, “conservative” body that is supposed to serve as a high hurdle for new legislation.

Dumb Dems don’t know this – and the smart ones don’t seem to be mentioning it – but the Senate can try to change this at any time.  It’s called “the nuclear option” – changing the Senate rules to forego cloture and close debate on a simple majority vote.  The Republicans talked about it when the Dems were holding up George W. Bush’s judicial nominees; they blinked and forged a compromise which was frustrating in the short run, but a good idea for the nation as a whole.

It’s one of a number of protections built into – or added onto – our system to protect the minority from the majority.  It’s like the electoral college…

…which is another thing the Dems wanted to tube when it twarted their ambitions.

Majority rules in this country – but not absolutely.  There’s a good reason for that; a stupid majority can be a terrible thing.

What is Germany? 

It’s a land, and its people; it is defined by geography, and by a mystical connection of ethnicity, people and language; the Germans call it “Volk“, which literally means “Folk”, but whose metaphorical meaning is far, far deeper – indeed, deeper than most Americans can gather, given our cultural history.  It ties Germans – ethnic Germans, born in Germany who grow up speaking German – to a place, a history, and a culture.   The same holds true for most of the world’s nations; the French, the Uighur, the Naga, the Swedes and Navajo and Russians and Malay and most other nations in between.   It’s one of the reasons that while one can immigrate to Germany or France or Nagaland or Sweden, one can not “become” French or Navajo or Swedish; it’s how you’re born.

And no matter what form each of those governments have taken over the years, it’s always been the same country.  Germany has been Germany, whether governed by the Holy Roman Emperor, dozens of dukes, Kaisers, gangs, Führers or a stable parliamentary Democracy, Germany is always Germany (or France, or Malaysia, or Sweden, or…).

And if part of Germany (etc) – say, Rheinland-Pfalz wanted to “leave” Germany? 

It’s an absurd question.  It’d be like you or I wanting to “leave” the human race and become a python.  You were born human.  You can be nothing else.  Rheinland-Pfalz has always been German; come democracy or dictator, it always will be.

Rheinland-Pfalz  can no more depart Germany and become part of, say, Canada than you can become a python.

———-

So what is America?

Well, we’re not a people united by land, culture, history, language and ethnicity, that’s for sure.  Even taking the hyper-simplistic far-left route and saying we’re “a nation founded for the benefit of white anglo-saxons” ignores the fact that white people of Anglo-Saxon descent have spent the last five centuries making killing other white Anglo-Saxons, and similar white Mediterraneans and Slavs, to an art and science.  The idea that you can create a cohesive nation out of Irish and English, or of Germans and Poles, or French and Spaniards, would have been considered absurd at any other place and time in history.

So what is America, if not ethnicity and culture and language?

Is it a piece of real estate between Mexico and Canada with a government in Washington and fifty regional offices?  A political collection of 300-odd-million people who exist for no reason other than to be a political collection of 300-odd-million people?

Or is it a cohesive series of radical ideas that happened to find 200-odd years of generally-successful political traction – ideas like “all people are created equal” and people being “endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights”, especially “life, liberty andthe pursuit of happiness”?

That’s a fairly simple question: most people will answer the latter.  It’s basic high school civics (or it used to be; I shudder to ask what kids are learning today – but that’s another issue).

At least, they’ll answer the latter under normal circumstances.  It’s when things get dicey that the answers get more interesting.

———-

In a comment thread the other day about an effigy-lynching in Plains, Georgia, a commenter wrote “are you aware that 33% of Georgians believe Georgia should secede from the Union – do you STILL think it’s specious to suggest they advocate a climate of hate.”

Leaving aside the gaping, almost-unbridgeable logic gap – secession does not equal “hate”, not in any logically coherent sense – it was an interesting question.

So what if a third of Georgians (allegedly) favor secession?

Let’s call the original question:  what is America?  Is it a place, or is it a series of ideas?

Ideas – right?

Right.  

But what if America stops representing those ideas?

———-

I’m not sure who I’m more angry at:

1. Democrats today, for their long, concerted effort to frame every discussion about the Tenth Amendment, to say nothing of the purely rhetorical idea of “secession”, in terms that are usually variants on “Oooh, you support slavery“.  It’s cheap abusive rhetoric that makes rational discussion impossible.  But then, that’s the goal. 
2. The Confederacy, for giving the left the eternal opening to forever tie the concept of states rights to slavery and Jim Crow in the first place.  Of all the liberties that should be the turf of the States and The People by the grace of the Tenth Amendment – commerce, regulation, taxation, and everything in the Bill of Rights – those geniuses just had to tie us and the whole issue to the “right” to own and oppress other humans.  Thanks for nothing, Bubba.

So to a big swathe of the American people, discussing something as benign as the Tenth Amendment, to say nothing of the much-more-loaded idea of secession, is a little like mentioning Keyser Söze; it’s just not something you do in polite company.

And some of the people who do talk about secession are, to be polite, a tad overheated; I chided some of the more drama-prone elements on the right, and before that some of the more spoiled, overweening, whiny elements on the left for taking, ironically, more or less the same approach; “the government isn’t what we want it to be, so let’s secede rather than bring things back into balance at the polls”.  Any talk of “secession” is, in our current situation, utterly misguided.

And conservatives who say “But Obama’s different” are just as wrong, so far, as the idiot liberals who frothed about the coming re-education camps and predicted Bush wouldn’t leave office last year.  Obama’s grabbing power, sure – but it’s hardly the first time in American history we’ve had an Administration gather more power to itself.  Polk?  Lincoln?  FDR?  Nixon?  Clinton?  Bush’s spending?   The mission, again, is to repudiate Obama at the polls (and I’m a lot more confident this will happen now than I was even six months ago).

But what if at some hypothetical point in the future the American goverment does stop being about “all people are created equal” and being “endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights”, especially “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?  What if – hypothetically – a big chunk of the United States ceased to believe in any of those ideals – or adopted a version of those ideals that was so perverted as to be unrecognizable?

Would the rest of the nation be bound to go along with it, because of a precedent set in 1865 over a dispute that had, in the end, was over an issue that everyone but everyone today agrees had no lasting objective merit (slavery and oppression)? 

Or should their allegiance be to the ideals themselves?

I’m not one of those conservatives who reflexively bashes government employees’ intelligence, motivations and personalities.  Some of my best friends – people I know, with brains and honorable motives – work at all levels of government, in all kinds of jobs.  Not a one of them went into government because it was the only job they could qualify for (well, mostly; there’s no real private-sector market for fighter pilots).

Government, itself?  That’s another story.  I believe in closely scrutinizing any government agency, especially those that aren’t directly involved with defending our nation’s security.

Apropos not much – but we’ll come back to it.

The Strib is shocked, shocked, in the wake of the alleged Abdulmutallab bombing attempt, that privacy-rights activists ever opposed full-body scanning at airports:

Even more troubling is the extent to which privacy activists have been able to influence the political debate and restrict the use of whole-body imaging scanners in U.S. airports. To rally the opposition, the term “virtual strip search” has been used, conjuring images of Transportation Security Administration TSA screeners huddled around computers ogling the most shapely passengers.

Right.  Because TSA employees are ascetic monks, immune to temptation.

That ridiculous scenario was too much for our elected officials, and the House overwhelming passed a nonbinding measure in June to prevent the scanners from being used for primary screening. The brainpower behind the amendment, rookie Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, referred to screened images as “TSA porn” and came up with this wonderful but ill-informed sound bite: “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

The Strib editorial board chides the privacy activists for their close-mindedness, in terms that stop just a little short of “why do Rebublicans hate airline passengers?”.

Now, I don’t have a huge problem with full-body scanning in and of itself, as a form of technology.  It’s what it represents – and what the Strib, and by extension the rest of the left and media, have seemed to embrace over the past eight years – that is the problem.

The implication on the part of the Strib is that we, the public, should shut up and undergo whatever indignity our betters decide is best for us, because that’s our betters’ job.  It puts all of the many burdens – inconvenience, implied suspicion, humiliation – on the travelling public. Of course, these measures are all, universally, reactive – which means that terroriosts will find a way around them (if they haven’t already); the scanning, with its intrusion and indignity, will also be useless.  Not that it’ll go away.

But the Strib has consistently opposed the measures that’d put the burden on the would-be terrorists; they opposed wiretapping Americans for whom there exists a reasonable suspicion.  When a group of citizens reacted with suspicion to a group of Muslin clerics whose behavior seemed, at this remove, stranger than Abdulmutallab’s, the Strib pilloried them, and those who defended them, as racists.  The Strib couldn’t possibly abide by the concept of “profiling” – focusing security’s efforts on those most likely to cause problems, 20-40 year old middle-to-upper-middle-class Muslim men – even though that’s precisely what Israel’s El Al, one of the biggest terrorism targets in the world, has done to make themselves perhaps the safest airline in the world.

In other words, the Strib is fine with measures that demean and degrade you, Joe and Jane Citizen, provided that they are utterly politically correct, and without regard to the fact that they are in the long run completely useless.

Thanks, Strib.  Same to you.

We’ve always known that those “Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota” signs and slogans were buncombe – but it was more of a gut feeling.

But now we have empirical, clinical proof it’s all bull-effluvia.  The unhappiest states are the ones with the highest taxes; the happiest ones, pretty much, have the lowest taxes (with occasional emphasis added by me):

Does living in a blue state make people blue? It seems so, according to a new study in Science magazine that ranks states according to their happiness. The study finds that New Yorkers are the unhappiest people in America and their neighbors in Connecticut come in a close second, followed by Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, California, and Illinois. And the happiest states? Drum roll, please…Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona.

Eight of the ten happiest states lean right while eight of the ten unhappiest tilt left. While the study by no means proves that being liberal makes people unhappy, it does reflect some of the unfortunate implications of living in a blue state.

As I noted above, this is “Science” magazine, not “Librels Are Teh Suck” blog. 

But first a note on the study. Using data from the 2005-2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and a 2003 economics paper examining quality-of-life indicators, economists regressed the subjective measure of well-being (how people rate their satisfaction) against the objective measure (states’ quality-of-life rankings based on compensating differentials). A compensating differential in labor economics refers to the additional amount of income an employer must pay a worker to compensate for the undesirability of a job or the location’s lack of amenities (e.g. local and state tax levels, climate, environmental conditions, quality of schools, and crime rates).

For example, employers in New York would have to pay higher wages to compensate for New York’s high taxes, traffic congestion, cold weather, and poor schools. Due to these “disamenities,” New York ranked lowest on the quality-of-life index.

And yes, the numbers show a pretty strong correlation:

What’s noteworthy about the study is that states’ quality-of-life rankings (measured by their compensating differentials) correlated exceedingly well with residents’ satisfaction ratings. The correlation between quality of life and satisfaction is statistically significant (P=0.0001; r=0.6; r2=0.36). The coefficient of determination r2 shows how well the regression line fits the data points. While an r2 of 0.36 may not seem large—and in some studies may not be statistically significant—it is unusually high by the standards of behavioral science. To give an idea of the magnitude of this correlation, the r2 of people’s satisfaction ratings taken two weeks apart is also 0.36.

Why?

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason—ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

Read the whole thing. 

While we’ve long known that conservatives are more charitable, are better in bed, and are just plain happier across the board than liberals, this is the first time we’ve shown a statistical correlation between taxation and misery.

I, for one, am happy to vote for a wealthier, happier, less-burdened Minnesota.

There are some government regulations that just seem, to people of all political stripes, to just plain make common sense.  Keeping rat hair out of our food supply?  Making sure our medication is actually medication, rather than dog urine in a drop pouch?  Making sure our airline pilots are qualified to fly the planes and, if the situation warrants, ditch them in the Hudson successfully?  No matter how orthodox a free-marketeer one is, it’s hard to argue with these.

And when big, bad, arrogant airlines make victims passengers sit on the tarmac for hours and hours, waiting for takeoff permissions that due to our overcrowded airports and snarled air traffic control system might never come, or at least may be very very tardy, as infants start to squall and toilets back up and flight crews have to change due to (yet more) government regulations?   These incidents – which garner all sorts of news coverage when they happen – are utterly infuriating to hear about; the most hardeded free-marketeer can imagine the smell, the sounds, the claustrophobia, and the sense that one is nothing but a particle in a badly-managed industrial stream.

Well, who could possibly argue with banning the practice?

We’ll come back to that.  But remember: all government actions have unintended consequences.  Often, especially with regulations that seem moderately innocuous on the surface, the unintended consequences are problems that are far worse than the one the regulation was originally intended to deal with.

“Penigma”, blogging at “Penigma”, notes that the Obama Administration is proposing new rules requiring airlines to deplane passengers after a three-hour wait.

This post could be several hundred pages,

[Those of you who know Penigma’s history as a commenter know – he’s not exaggerating. Ed]

but I’ll try to keep it down to about four paragraphs.

[It came to nine – Ed.]

Two days ago, the FAA under the Obama Administration mandated that should anyone be stuck on a plane more than two hours, they must be given food and water, and the lavatories on the plane must be operable and available. If they are stuck more than three hours, that the plane must return to the gate and off-load the passengers. Between Jan 2009 and June 2009, there were 631 incidents of planes sitting on the tarmack [sic] for more than three hours, so any of us who travel often deeply appreciate the change and probably even say, “FINALLY!” to the idea that this was a long-needed redress of an abusive and aggregeious [sic] practice by the airlines.

As someone who gets a little claustrophobic on planes (I’m 6’5, and planes these days are not built to be even remotely comfortable for anyone over a relatively lilliputian 6’0), I’ll testify; waiting on the runway sucks.  And the longest I’ve had to sit was probably 90 minutes, coming back from New York last year. 

But remember that number and the process behind it; last year, the proposed rule would have required 631 planes to return to the terminal and deplane.

Penigma doesn’t mention that this rule is accompanied by big fines.

The reaction from the airlines was typical. One commented that this ran counter to the idea of getting the most flights completed, which was the ‘goal’ the commenter said they were required to meet.

Now, I’m not sure why Penigma opted to put scare quotes around “goal”; flight completion is a pretty vital metric for airlines.  And once an airliner pushes away from the boarding gate, it’s considered to be on its way; returning to the terminal is a complex process that involves a lot more than just marching people off the plane back to the terminal; at busy airports, boarding gates are tightly scheduled; the luggage will need to be taken off the plane and held somewhere, and probably sorted according to whatever plan emerges to get the passengers to their destinations.  It’s a lot of work.  But it’s a huge problem.

Right?

We’ll come back to that shortly.

So here’s the point – Obama acted in my opinion where Bush and the Republicans would not have.

Penigma being a clairvoyant, perhaps he should start predicting stock markets on his blog.

Bush would have made platitudes about letting the market correct the problem and that any ‘regulation’ here was overkill and unnecessary – as he so frequently did on a myriad of issues.

Well, yes. And for good reason.

Because as it happens economist John Lott also commented on the issue.  And yes, Lott is a bit of a free-marketeer:

It seems like such an obvious regulation right? It is important to note first that airlines have a strong incentive to get things right to begin with. If they keep people a long time on the tarmac, people won’t fly their airlines again.

It’s no secret; airlines that develop bad reputations start to shed passengers; I know that on the rare occasions when I fly at all (anything less than a ten-hour drive is actually better spent in the car, unless someone else is paying me to make the flight), I actively eschew airlines with awful reputations (you hear me knocking, NWA?) for leaving planes on the runway.

But since Lott’s an economist, let’s talk numbers:

This year through Oct. 31, there were 864 flights with taxi out times of three hours or more, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Transportation officials, using 2007 and 2008 data, said there are an average of 1,500 domestic flights a year carrying about 114,000 passengers that are delayed more than three hours. . . .”

That is an annual rate of 1,037 flights this year. For 2007 and 2008, it is an average of 822.5 million passengers and 10.94 million flights. So that is 0.01 percent of passengers were on flights delayed by more than three hours and 0.01 percent of flights.

In other words, one out of 10,000 passengers and flights are ever delayed by three hours or longer.

So what happens (I’ll add emphasis)?

 Given the huge fines per passenger, airlines won’t even put people on planes if there is a chance that the plane won’t take off soon. Zero tolerance rules also make about as much sense here as they do for schools or anything else.

Given the fines involved, it’s entirely likely the airlines will play it “better safe than sorry”, and not only scrub flights that are getting close to the three-hour limit, but flights that have any risk at all of going over the limit.  Weather closing in on O’Hare? Scrub all connecting flights!  Blizzard approaching Denver?  Scrub every flight that will connect through DIA!

Instead of one in 10,000 passengers waiting on tarmacs for three hours or more (as galling as that is), you’ll have many, many times that number stuck in terminals trying to find connections, while the airlines quite sensibly protect themselves from huge fines.

Passengers value getting to their destinations and they also value not being stuck on planes, but who is best to make those decisions? The customers or the government? It is also costly to return passengers to the terminal and remove baggage from the planes before the three hours are up. If airlines make the wrong decisions, what do you think will happen to whether passengers are willing to take their planes. If this is a significant problem, should airlines be competing against each other for passengers based on this issue? The rules will make the airlines more risk averse than passengers want them to be. One clear implication is that this will raise the price of air travel.

But then, in the era of Hope and Change, we must ALL be happy to pay more.

Information, as usual, would make the market work better…:

There are probably a range of responses that different airlines will take on their own. If you are in first class, you probably get served a lot even when you are on the tarmac. Some airlines will serve passengers in coach more than others. Those services cost something and passengers can pick the airlines that they want based upon price and whether they are willing to save a few dollars and take that additional risk. People can bring water bottles on the plane with them if they would rather save a few dollars and do it that way.

Lott also notes that the Feds are framing this to the airlines in the form of “an offer they can’t refuse”..:

What bothered me was a report that the transportation department warned airlines not to appeal the decision.

Fortunately for the travelling public (those that will be able to afford to fly at all), America’s air terminals are places of scenic wonder, where one can meditate.  Think “my flight got scrubbed for the greater good.  My flight got scrubbed for the greater good”.

It was 28 years ago this week that Romuald Spasowki, the Polish ambassador to the United States, defected to the United States, kicking off a chain of events that forever underscored what America should be all about.For the previous year, democracy-loving Poles had given communism its biggest internal challenge ever.

The Solidarity trade union movement, led by Lech Wałęsa, had started by paralyzing the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk; the strikes spread nationwide; it was becoming an untenable challenge to the Communists.

Solidarity Congress at the Gdansk Shipyard

The movement was snowballing, paralyzing much of Poland’s industry:

Riot at the Nowy Huta Steelworks

On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, breaking up Solidarity strikes by force and arresting Wałęsa and many of his followers.

Jaruzelski announcing martial law on Polish TV

Jaruzelski acted decisively – siccing the ZOMO riot police (who were to 1981 Poland what Noriega’s “Dignity Battalions” were to Panama in 1989 and the basiji are to Iran today) on demonstrators around the country, attacking them with clubs, dogs, water cannon and worse.

Staring south at a northbound wall of thugs; ZOMO riot police.

While a case can be made that Jaruzelski was acting to prevent a Soviet invasion – like the one that had crushed a similar flowering of pro-liberty agitation in Czechoslovakia only 13 years earlier, or in Budapest and Gdansk just 12 years before that – there was no mistaking it on the Polish street; ZOMO’s boot was on their neck.

Ambassador Spasowski had been a communist his entire adult life – but he was also a Polish patriot; his family had fought in the Polish resistance during World War II; his father had died in Gestapo custody.

And his communism had been eroding over the years.  Like all good communists, he’d started out as an atheist.  But his wife, Wanda Spasowska, had gradually won him over to Poland’s majority faith, Catholicism.  And the elevation of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II was the last nail in the coffin of his faith in Communism.

And in December of 1981 Spasowski saw what was happening in Poland…

…and he couldn’t take anymore.  On December 20, he called the State Department, and expressed his desire to defect to the United States.

And it was 29 years ago at about this moment that Ronald Reagan hosted Ambassador Spasowski and Madame Spasowska to the White House.

Madame Spasowska, President Reagan, Ambassador Spasowski

Let me re-emphasize that: Ronald Reagan welcomed the highest-ranking defector in the history of Communism to the very seat of American power.  He took a source of immense, caustic embarassment to Warsaw’s puppet regime (who held a drumhead “trial” for Ambassador Spasowki and sentenced him to death in absentia in the coming weeks) and their gangster overlords in Moscow, and made him not just a refugee, but a highly-honored guest of the American people.  He gave them, in essence, the key to the nation – a ringing endorsement of Solidarnosc, of the Polish freedom fighters, and of the fight for liberty in a dismal land that wanted, and deserved, better.

———-

And then he did it one better.  The next day, December 23 1981, he took the traditional Christmas speech to the nation – traditionally a conciliatory, warm, fuzzy affair – and turned it into a broadside of rhetorical grapeshot onto the packed decks of communist boarders.  I will add the odd bit of emphasis:

As I speak to you tonight, the fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance. For a thousand years, Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.

The men who rule them and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish. They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps. Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders are imprisoned, their fate unknown. Factories, mines, universities, and homes have been assaulted.

The Polish Government has trampled underfoot solemn commitments to the UN Charter and the Helsinki accords. It has even broken the Gdansk agreement of August 1980, by which the Polish Government recognized the basic right of its people to form free trade unions and to strike.

Compare this to Obama’s initial response to the demonstrations in Iran.  If you can.

Reagan didn’t limit things; he went all-in:

The target of this depression [repression] is the Solidarity Movement, but in attacking Solidarity its enemies attack an entire people. Ten million of Poland’s 36 million citizens are members of Solidarity. Taken together with their families, they account for the overwhelming majority of the Polish nation. By persecuting Solidarity the Polish Government wages war against its own people.

I urge the Polish Government and its allies to consider the consequences of their actions. How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity? Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society, and the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics.

And Reagan wasn’t just “expressing concern” or “sending a message”, either:

I want emphatically to state tonight that if the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and will not conduct “business as usual” with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake, their crime (!!!) will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere. I do not make this statement lightly or without serious reflection.

We have been measured and deliberate in our reaction to the tragic events in Poland. We have not acted in haste, and the steps I will outline tonight and others we may take in the days ahead are firm, just, and reasonable.

No, not just words.  There was a plan – one that would directly separate the people from their oppressors:

In order to aid the suffering Polish people during this critical period, we will continue the shipment of food through private humanitarian channels, but only so long as we know that the Polish people themselves receive the food. The neighboring country of Austria has opened her doors to refugees from Poland. I have therefore directed that American assistance, including supplies of basic foodstuffs, be offered to aid the Austrians in providing for these refugees.

But to underscore our fundamental opposition to the repressive actions taken by the Polish Government against its own people, the administration has suspended all government-sponsored shipments of agricultural and dairy products to the Polish Government…We have halted the renewal of the Export-Import Bank’s line of export credit insurance to the Polish Government. We will suspend Polish civil aviation privileges in the United States. We are suspending the right of Poland’s fishing fleet to operate in American waters. And we’re proposing to our allies the further restriction of high technology exports to Poland.

Knowing the Poles weren’t just a proud people – who isnt? – but a people that had put it all on the line for liberty before.  Reagan invoked our shared history…:

When 19th century Polish patriots rose against foreign oppressors, their rallying cry was, “For our freedom and yours.” Well, that motto still rings true in our time. There is a spirit of solidarity abroad in the world tonight that no physical force can crush. It crosses national boundaries and enters into the hearts of men and women everywhere. In factories, farms, and schools, in cities and towns around the globe, we the people of the Free World stand as one with our Polish brothers and sisters. Their cause is ours, and our prayers and hopes go out to them this Christmas.

…tying the American and Polish people together rhetorically as well as through his actions.

Can you imagine the current Administration doing that?  Ever?

And finally – something that I think about every Christmas, especially in times like these:

Yesterday, I met in this very room with Romuald Spasowski, the distinguished former Polish Ambassador who has sought asylum in our country in protest of the suppression of his native land. He told me that one of the ways the Polish people have demonstrated their solidarity in the face of martial law is by placing lighted candles in their windows to show that the light of liberty still glows in their hearts.

Ambassador Spasowski requested that on Christmas Eve a lighted candle will burn in the White House window as a small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people. I urge all of you to do the same tomorrow night, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we’re taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles.

And so Reagan lit a candle.  And across America, so did millions more, in America’s Polish hubs in Chicago and Milwaukee of course, but in millions of homes that couldn’t pronounce “Czestoszowa” but who could tell good from evil.  And though the puppet regime in Warsaw and their masters in Moscow tried to stifle the story, the word got through to millions of Poles in the street, and thousands in jail; the American President, and the people he leads, are with you.

It would be seven years before Reagan could issue his challenge to Gorbachev to “tear down the wall”; it would be nine years before the Berlin Wall finally fell.  But one could make a strong case that the first crack appeared 28 years ago tonight, when a brave man without a country (for a few years, anyway; the Polish parliament reinstated the Spasowski’s citizenship in 1994) met with a visionary, and sent a simple message; “freedom lives, and we support it”.

It was a simple message, but one that turned out to be overwhelmingly successful:  in 1980, the world had just 56 democracies.  In 1990, the total rose to 76; by 1994, the number reached 114 – a 100% jump in fourteen years.

The Polish National Anthem (“Mazurek Dabrowskiego“), written by Poles who like Ambassador Spasowka were also in exile (in about 1800, with Bonaparte’s Polish Legion), goes:

Jeszcze Polska nie umarła,
Kiedy my żyjemy
Co nam obca moc wydarła,
Szablą odbijemy.

(Poland has not perished yet
So long as we still live
That which alien force has seized
We at sabrepoint shall retrieve)

It was 28 years ago tonight that the sabre came out – rhetorically speaking.  And the whole world is better off for it today.

The Supreme Court of Minnesota (hereafter referred to as SCOM) says “didn’t actually drive drunk?  Tough –  W your wife did, so the police get a shiny new Tahoe!“.

An “innocent owner” cannot avoid forfeiture of a vehicle when it is jointly owned with the offender in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a split decision published Thursday.

The case involved a Cambridge man whose wife was cited for drunken driving while driving their 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe. The vehicle was seized from owner David Lee Laase. He argued in district court that the SUV should not have been taken away because he was an “innocent owner” under state law.

“This is really a major, major decision,” said Isanti County Attorney Jeffrey Edblad, who credited Assistant County Attorney Shila Walek Hooper for her work. “This is a case that obviously has statewide impact as it relates to being able to keep motor vehicles out of the hands of drunk drivers.”

Laase’s attorney, Brian Karalus, of St. Paul, disagreed.

“This opens up the floodgates for the government to come in and seize property of a 100 percent, completely innocent person,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Now, as I’ve pointed out many times to people who get overheated about court decisions, “the law means what it says it means” (which is partly false; it means what it and related case law say it means – which is why our society is all clogged with lawyers, who are the only people who can untangle it reliably, since the system was built by lawyers to be completely inscrutable to all the rest of us.  But I digress).

So what does the law say?

Under state law, a vehicle cannot be seized “if its owner can demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the owner did not have actual or constructive knowledge that the vehicle would be used or operated in any manner contrary to law or that the owner took reasonable steps to prevent the use of the vehicle by the offender.”

The district court and Court of Appeals agreed that Laase qualified.

But the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court’s ruling, saying that “while Mr. Laase may be an innocent owner, Ms. Laase is not.”

Now, I’m going to suspect there may well be a little bit of backstory there that didn’t make it into the story (inasmuch as the story was likely written by a non-lawyer), but I’m thinking there’s substantial grounds here for a…

{{facepalm}}

“Ms. Laase is not” the innocent owner.  Right. Got that, SCOM.

But if one owner’s guilt is enough to void the whole “innocent owner” law, then there’s no such thing as an innocent owner, is there?   There’s only “owners who don’t co-own things with anyone accused of anything”, and “guilty owners and their victims”.

The SCOM: working to make government richer, more powerful and more stupid for over 150 years.

Remember when government surveillance of Americans (against whom there was probably cause to believe they were in contact with foreign terrorists) was the biggest threat the Constitution ever faced?

Either does the Obama administration:

The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.

Now, I have to admit that I think the “right to privacy” is a pretty thin thread, online; to expect that what you write on, say, Twitter or a blog can be presumed to some degree to be public.  Facebook – where the user builds a “closed network” – would be less public.  Email should be private.

But when the government is trawling the ‘net looking for dissenters…:

In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of a man suspected of helping coordinate protests at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh by sending out messages over Twitter.

“But that’s a criminal investigation!”

Well, yeah.  So far:

Wired magazine reported last month that In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, has put money into Visible Technologies, a software company that crawls across blogs, online forums, and open networks like Twitter and YouTube to monitor what is being said.

Obama’s CIA, trawling the ‘net to monitor what Americans are saying.

“No biggie!”

Really?  And in 2012 or 2016, when a Republican wins the White House and dissent is suddenly the highest form of patriotism again?

The networks are running a riveting 911 call audio tape of an elderly woman describing in detail the efforts, for over ten minutes, of an intruder to gain entry to her home.

“They need to hurry. He’s going to break this thing open. When he does, I’ll have to kill him and I don’t want to kill him,” Jackson said during the 911 call.

Gun in hand, she asks the dispatcher for guidance, essentially seeking legal advice. Can she kill him? The dispatcher seeks counsel from a colleague and in essence, gives her the go-ahead to use lethal force and potentially take his life if he gains entry.

And he gone done it.

Using patio furniture to smash through a window, convicted felon Billy Dean Riley didn’t realize he just brought a lawn chair to a gun fight.

“Once he smashed the glass out he stepped into the residence and she used the shotgun to fire one shot which hit the intruder center of the chest and (he) fell back out of the house”

He be dead.

Is she in trouble?

No.

Many states including Oklahoma have adopted the “Castle Doctrine” which essentially stipulates a homeowner can defend his or her home from an intruder with deadly force and can deliberately shoot to kill without legal consequence (save the resultant need for carpet cleaning).

A Castle Doctrine (also known as a Castle Law or a Defense of Habitation Law) is an legal doctrine that arose from English Common Law that designates one’s place of residence (or, in some states, any place legally occupied, such as one’s car or place of work) as a place in which one enjoys protection from illegal trespassing and violent attack. It then goes on to give a person the legal right to use deadly force to defend that place (his/her “Castle”), and/or any other innocent persons legally inside it, from violent attack or an intrusion which may lead to violent attack. In a legal context, therefore, use of deadly force which actually results in death may be defended as “Justifiable homicide” under the Castle Doctrine.

Oklahoma happens to be a “Castle State,” while others have a “duty to retreat” clause wherein the homeowner has a duty to get out of the way of the would-be offender, others grant the homeowner a “stand your ground” clause. I was curious as to the Status of Minnesota.

The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor’s place of abode.

Minnesota as it were, is a stand your ground state as long as you are in your home. It gets murky outside the home and in public areas, despite attempts to strengthen the law in the interest of would-be victims of violent crimes.

Hmm. I wonder if one’s comment section is considered a place legally “occupied” by the owner and as such…uh, never mind.

MITCH ADDS: Er, not so fast here.  Minnesota’s law is incredibly murky in this area  One of the elements of an affirmative self-defense claim in Minnesota is that the home-owner has to make every reasonable effort to disengage and de-escalate, where “reasonable” means ‘would convince a jury”.  How reasonable is “reasonable?”  It depends on how zealously anti-gun your local prosecutor is.  In Granite Falls, a simple “go away, I have a gun” might get you off.  In Saint Paul, fleeing your attacker until you’re in the very last closet in the very furthest room from the burglar’s entry point might be enough to keep the prosecutor off your back, but that’s no guarantee; the prosecutor might maintain that if you’d actually given the burglar your gun and kids, he’d have gone away and you’d have averted a fatal shooting.  The jury might or might not be another thing – but that means a trial, which means hiring a defense attorney and burning up a whole lot of money.

Rep. Tony Cornish proposed a “stand your ground” bill in the ’07 legislature, back when the grownups still controlled one chamber in the legislature.  It got completely slandered by the ill-informed, in-the-bag media, which called it a “shoot first” bill; has anyone considered the ramifications of shooting second, by the way?  Anyway – a stand your ground law would be a good thing; it’d define how far you have to back down on your own property, instead of leaving it up to prosecutors’ discretion. 

It’s yet another reason we need to win the legislature back this year.

Democrats Diane Feinstein and Dick “Turban” Durbin – who have long been the Dems’ official trial-balloon-floaters for assaults on free speech like the “Fairness Doctrine” – are proposing an amendment to a Senate bill (S.448) clarifying the press shield law.

And it’s aimed squarely at citizen journalists like you and I.  Via RWN, here’s the amendment text, with some emphases added:

AMENDMENTS intended to be proposed by Mrs. FEINSTEIN (for herself and Mr. DURBIN )

Viz:

In section 10(2)(A), strike clause (iii) and insert the following:

[a “journalist” is shielded if he/she] (iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—

(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, 1or other means; and

(II) that—

(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;

(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;

(cc) operates a programming service; or

(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

In other words, you need to be an employee of a news business.  All of us hobby hacks in our pajamas in our basements are out in the cold.

In section 10(2)(B), strike ‘‘and’’ at the end.

In section 10(2)(C), strike the period at the end and insert ‘‘; and’’.

In section 10(2), add at the end the following:

(D) does not include an individual who gathers or disseminates the protected information sought to be compelled anonymously or under a pseudonym.

This would seem to be aimed at the likes of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles – provided they’re not employed by a Major News Outlet, of course.

Leaving aside the obvious indication that this is the Democrats’ way of circling their wagons around ACORN – this is a fascinating look into the authoritarianism of the Democrat party at work.

The conservative blogosphere is dominated by independents who cover their fields of expertise, whatever they are (this blog: music, financial planning, wine, tomatos and Minnesota politics) for the pure, unadulterated love of the game.  From Power Line (which covers all they survey) to Speed Gibson (who patrols the ramparts of northwest-suburban education), we mostly do it because we want to, money be damned. 

The left, on the other hand, has built up a network of “business” entities and non-profits, from the pseudo-newspaper-y “MNPost” to the not-very-covert propagandists at the “Center for Independent Media” (parent of the Minnesoros “Indepdendent”), at exquisite cost; one might now presume that this money was spent to get ahead of the legislative curve that the Feinstein/Durbin proposal represents, as a further attempt to shut down independent, non-government-vetted thought in this country.

This is Obama’s America.

Thursday, November 19, is National Ammo Day – a great day to not only restock the home arsenal, but to send a tacit, affirming message that your liberty is not here to be fed upon by vermin, whether in ski masks or wearing three piece suits.

Ammo is scarce, these days; every day’s been Ammo Day since Obama and his pack of gun-grabbers took office.

All the more reason to get out there on Thursday.

(And if you have a good line on .45ACP, by all means do holler…)

…yesterday morning as I buttoned my shirt and tied my tie.

Why haven’t we heard anything about immigration lately?

And then we did.

Napolitano pronounces US border more secure now

…as evidenced by the fact that we’ve built some more fence,  enlarged the government’s payroll and, uh, because of the crappy economy no one is coming here anymore.

Janet, speak up! I didn’t catch that last part.

No one is coming here anymore.

Ah. It’s another Quoniam inquam sic from the Obama administration. So I took it and threw it on a pile of other rubbish which includes  “this Recovery Act has worked as intended,”  “America wants health care reform and is willing to pay for it” and  “[Cash for Clunkers has been] successful beyond anybody’s imagination.”

Then again, the time to fortify our borders may have already passed. The terrorists may already be here.

…meanwhile, the Pope is scanning the sky for alien life. Either this is related, or all the world’s leaders have lost their marbles.

It was twenty years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell.

It’s hard to remember at twenty years remove that it, and the Communism it represented, didn’t just get swept away in a wave of small-l liberal euphoria. 

Dinesh D’Souza, in his excellent bio of Reagan, notes that between 1980 and 1983, the experts were united in their belief that the “Second World”, Communism, was here to stay.  Make no mistake, people had recovered from the spell of Walter Duranty long enough to know that the Soviet system was cruel and corrupt gangster-run autocracy even worse than Chicago.  The publication of The Gulag Archipelago and other releases from the samisdat media, and the flood of people who fled Germany from 1948 through 1961, popped the bubble of acceptability that had accompanied travesties like Stalin’s “Man of the Year” awards in 1939 and 1942, and Stalinism’s embrace by “intelligentsia” throughout the West (including the early version of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer/Labor Party).   The stories of the thousands of heroic Soviet-bloc citizens who risked death and imprisonment fleeing their foetid, starving, lumpen homelands inspired many a young patriot in the day.

But while the bloom was long off the rose of western acceptance of Communism, the number of western intellectuals who seriously believed in 1980 that the decade would see the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in short order, communism itself would have fit in a single room at a Ramada Inn. 

There had been resistance, of course; in Budapest and Gdansk in 1956, Prague in 1967, Gdansk again in ’71 – all put down with ruthless brutality by the authorities, including the Soviet military.

And so I’m not aware that anyone held out that much hope for change in 1979 – thirty years ago – when Lech Walesa, a young electrician in Gdansk, led a pro-democracy union strike in Gdansk.  The movement had traction, of course – it swept Poland, and threatened to spin out of control; the Polish Army under General Wojciech Jaruzelski staged what amounted to a last-ditch military coup to bring down the government and declare martial law to quell the strikes, siccing “ZOMO” thugs (no, it’s not Polish for SEIU) on the protesters and strikers.  Jaruzelski was reviled around the world for the action – although there is evidence that history has misjudged the General, that he acted as did many in the Polish Army, as a Polish patriot, to prevent a Soviet invasion, which would have been much, much worse).

And indeed, had the status quo ante held sway after 1980, nothing much would have happened.

But in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan signalled an end to detente – the diplomatic legitimazion of the Soviet gangster regime.  Reagan jacked up the rhetoric war, and the civil support for trade unionists behind the Iron Curtain (with considerable help from Margaret Thatcher, the Pope and, speaking of strange bedfellows, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO), as well as building up the US military from its post-Vietnam nadir (although to be fair Jimmy Carter had realized the problem, and taken a few of the necessary high-level steps to start facilitating this).   The rhetorical confrontation peaked at Reagan’s classic Brandenburg Gate speech in 1987…

…but the diplomatic war had reached its Battle of Stalingrad at the Rejkjavik conference the year before, when Reagan called Gorbachev’s bluff on intermediate-range nukes.  Lily-livered pundits in the west flew into a panic, expecting mushroom clouds over London…

…but Gorbachev blinked.  He realized the communist East could not outlast the free West.  He accelerated the “liberalization” of the USSR and the Communist bloc – not to extinct it, initially, but to try to save it.

It was too late.  The Poles tossed aside the commies, followed by the Czechs. 

It didn’t go entirely without a fight, though.  As the Baltic States – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – tried to follow neighboring Poland’s suit, Soviet soldiers attacked some demonstrations.

But in dizzyingly short order, the Communist Bloc, which had killed tens of millions of people in the previous seventy years (estimates range from 20 to 60 million) and floated on a sea of blood that dwarved even Hitler’s monumental crimes against humanity, fell, kicked to the curb in a sea of ebullient humanity.

The left never got it.  Some of them had backed the wrong team.  Others were so invested in the idea that capitalism and western-style liberty were obsolete that they couldn’t wrap their arms around the new reality.

Some believe that if western-style democracy and liberty were so cool, the nations left in the wake of the fall of The Wall should have been able to get up and run from the get-go.  I distinctly remember Tom Brokaw, in 1992, describing Poland’s difficulties in changing from a command economy to free-enterprise.  “Et wrold sheem thut Eesturrrn Yurp’s ukspurramunt in Kapetelezm hez FEHLED” (“it would seem Eastern Europe’s experiment in capitalism has failed“), he said, with no further comment, apparently seeking his own Waltern Cronkite “this war can not be won” moment, writing off three whole years of effort on Poland’s part.  He was wrong, of course; Poland survived, and thrived.  And while the road to prosperity has been difficult for some former Soviet counties (indeed, for Russia itself, which may or may not be socially amenable to small-L liberal goverment), most of Eastern Europe thrives today, free of prowling Black Marias and windowless trains in the dark for long enough that people are starting to forget what they meant. 

Which must be an incredible blessing.

But Brokaw’s pronouncement, more than anything I can remember, started curing me of the habit of watching network news.

There are those who still say the whole fall of The Wall was Gorbachev’s idea – an idea that requires a preposterous suspension of disbelief, buying the notion that the Politburo – think Capi di Tutti Capi in Russian – would turn the Premiership over to anyone whose goal wasn’t the survival of the system. 

Whatever.

My many friends and acquaintances and neighbors and co-workers over the past twenty years who fled to the West tell me that they and their people back home remember who their real friends are.

So – Fröhliche Zwanzigste Jahre der Freiheit, Deutschland.  Und viele mehr.

May the rest of us remember.

At least better than our feckless current leadership does.  Obama blew off the observance, just as he blew off Poland’s observance, six weeks ago, of the beginning on its soil of the greatest single cataclysm of human history.

Just as well.  He’d probably deliver a heartfelt apology for the US having won.

Look – there’s no real suspense.  I’m voting for Eva Ng for Mayor of Saint Paul tomorrow.

Why?  Well, I have 100 reasons:

1. Because in the 22 years since I first moved to Saint Paul, things have gone way downhill…
2. …after going way way way uphill for a solid decade under Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly.  Lost progress is like no progress at all.
3. And it stinks to watch a lot of progress getting flushed down the drain.
4. Because Saint Paul’s school system is an unmitigated disaster…
5. …and the only way it’s going to change is if there’s an epic realignment in City Hall…
6. …and at 360 Colborn (which is also why I’m voting for John Krenik, Pat Igo and Chris Conner for School Board).
7. Because she scares the crap out of the status quo.  She’s female and she’s Asian – two constituencies that the DFL basically considers trained pets, best seen (at the polls) but not heard (if they disagree with the DFL line in any way).
8. And until these “hereditary DFL constituencies” show the DFL that they’re not just a bunch of sinecure voters they can count on no matter what kind of crap they throw out, there’ll never be any improvement.
9. And she will be seen and heard in office.  And that’s good for everyone…
10. …but the Saint Paul DFL.  Tough.
11. Because it can be done.  If Bret Schundler could win three terms as mayor of Jersey City, Eva Ng can win Saint Paul.
12. And Eva’s message – fiscal responsibility, jobs, business – aren’t that different from Schundler’s.
13. And while too many people in Saint Paul are immune to common sense, quite a few – in Frogtown, Dayton’s Bluff, the North End, Battle Creek – are all too well aware of how badly the Coleman Administration’ policies have failed them.
14. Because this is a city crammed with beautiful, solid, wonderfully-built homes that are just dying to have a bunch of new homeowners move in and invest “sweat equity” in…
15. …but the Saint Paul City Council has taken the nannystatist position that “since some remodelers are flippers, and others don’t know what they’re doing, we’ll make it impossible for all of them”.
16. (Or at least that’s their stated reason).
17. Anyway – what’s that doing to your property values?  Especially if you live on the North End, on Dayton’s Bluff, or in endlessly-besieged Frogtown?
18. Because Ng’s a businesswoman…
19. …and Saint Paul is in dire need of more business people and fewer party animals running the city.
20. And Chris Coleman, whatever else you can say about him, is mayor because he’s a DFLer who’s put in his time.  (I’ll give credit where it’s due; Coleman is a perfectly fine human being, and an excellent bagpiper.  See?  I’m a uniter, not a divider).
21. Indeed, electing Eva Ng would derail one of the most noxious aspects of Saint Paul’s one-party rule; the notion that being Mayor of Saint Paul is a perk that’s awarded to the DFLer that’s been plugging away for the party the longest.
22. Which is pretty much how the Saint Paul DFL sees things.  And we do deserve better.
23. But we’ll never get it if we keep enabling the practice.
24. And make no mistake about it; Saint Paul’s DFLers see it exactly that way.  One of the first things I saw a St. Paul DFLer write when Ng announced her campaign was “Oh, yeah?  What’s she done for Saint Paul so far?”  As if the only worthy background for governing is to be part of the machine that caused the problems to begin with.
25. Because Ng is not part of the machine.  Indeed, she’s pretty much the opposite; if there’s a political organization anywhere in the world that is not a “machine”, it’s the Saint Paul GOP.
26. Indeed, if you’re a Republican, having Eva Ng win – or even make a strong showing – would send a message to a big chunk of the CD4 GOP; “pay attention to what’s going on south of Larpenteur; it matters!”
27. And it’s important that it does – because Minnesota will never be more than a dingy, moldy blue shade of purple until the GOP makes a contest of it in the Cities.
28. Because she’s a political newcomer.  She’s no professional politician; indeed, you can tell, because…
29. …she doesn’t talk like a politician.  She talks like a human.
30. Ng is a turnaround specialist.  Her entire career involves taking companies that are floundering, and turning them into successes.
31. And if Saint Paul under Chris Coleman isn’t floundering, then the term truly has no meaning.
32. Because Ng’s business background has taught her how to succeed with limited resources…
33. …while the Saint Paul DFL and the Coleman Administration only know one thing; take whatever their agenda demands them to take, and screw the consequences.
34. Ng is a Republican.
35. Much more important than that, she’s a fiscal conservative.
36. And Saint Paul has suffered terribly over the years from the depredations of the tax-‘n-spend crowd.
37. Because when the mayor can say, with a straight face, that we need to lay off cops and firemen while we’re building indoor ice rinks, something is drastically wrong.
38. And when we’re paying for cops and firemen with LGA – money the city does not control – while paying for non-essentials with property taxes (the party they do legitimately control), that’s just irresponsible.
39. Because the mayor of a city of 275,000 does not need an executive staff with two dozen offices (and many  more employees than that).
40. Because the Saint Paul City Council’s hostility to business, especially small business, is killing this city.
41. No, seriously – when I say “hostility to business”, it’s not Republican hyperbole!
42. Because the City Council’s hostility to small landlords (that aren’t controlled by the city) in the name of “affordable housing” is making affordable housing (not controlled by the city) unavailable.
43. And because demonizing landlords – which is what the SPCC is doing – has worked so well for making housing affordable in New York, San Francisco and Portland.
44. Because Chris Coleman spoke seriously about closing the tiny little long-paid-for library two blocks from my house, the one my kids grew up going to…
45. …while he found the money to build indoor ice rinks.
46. Because an Ng win would show Saint Paul’s newest immigrants  – the H’mong, Somalis and others – that not only do you not have to be white and anglo to be Mayor, but you don’t have to be a DFLer if you’re not Caucasian.
47. And then we can have an “honest discussion” about what a disaster DFL rule is, has been for the past 45 years, and will forever more be for the city’s “minorities” (who are in fact, a decided majority in the school system).
48. And if we make inroads into the school board (go John, Pat and Chris!), we can talk about why the Saint Paul Public Schools are such a disastrous place – moreso than even the Philadelphia and Detroit systems – for minority kids.
49. And we can talk honestly about why the DFL wants so desperately to close the charter schools that have popped up all over Saint Paul…
50. …and which are the only real refuge for the thousands of those “Saint Paulites of Color” who’ve found that the SPPS was a waste of time and effort for their kids, and responded by voting with their feet.
51. Because the “light rail” may be a done deal and unavoidable, but it is going to gut the Midway.  Gut it.  And Ng is the only politician in Saint Paul who is being honest about that fact.
52. Because the City Council and the Mayor don’t want the Midway to know the world of hurt – traffic, economic dislocation, tearing down and rebuilding, and finally artificial gentrification – that await the neighborhood.
53. Because after a generation of patient, market-based rebuilding, Frogtown and its largely Asian people, especially it’s almost-entirely Asian business community up and down University, deserve better than what this light rail boondoggle is going to give them…
54. …which is “shred them like a lawnmower in a cabbage patch” in the short term, and try to gentrify the hell out of the parts of the street that aren’t turned into arid drive-through lands by the train.
55. Because the free market has helped turn the West End from a reeking, crime-ridden toilet into a decent, occasionally thriving neighborhood.
56. Because this city has been run by, for, and about the wishes and ideology of Merriam Park’s ofay DFL elitists – the people who were turning out to raise funds for Kathleen Soliah’s defense fund – for far too long.
57. Because the mayor and the city council have nothing but contempt for the beliefs of all those Latinos who live in Saint Paul’s most dynamic, fascinating neighborhood, the West Side.
58. And the Latino community still votes DFL. 
59. Because the North End has enough strikes against it, even without the City Council’s misguided vacant building ordinance.  The ordinance puts a boot on the throat of any chance the neighborhood has of recovering any time soon, making “sweat equity” virtually illegal…
60. …except for the City Council’s and the mayor’s friends in the non-profit community.
61. The same goes for Frogtown…
62. …and even more for Dayton’s Bluff, where the mortgage crisis has virtually emptied block after block…
63. …that will, by law, pretty much have to stay empty until the city gets around to doing something about it…
64. …which will be long, long after the market would do something about it. 
65. Because Battle Creek and the far East Side are watching to see if city and state tax policy drive the rest of 3M out of town, turning those neighborhoods into ghost-towns like so much of the Bluff and the North End…
66. …and the Administration – the Mayor and City Hall – can’t be bothered, since they’re busy making you happier and happier to pay for a “better” Saint Paul…
67. …where “better” equals more and more city jobs, programs and spending, as opposed to real jobs, real quality of life, real potential…
68. …and real reasons for anyone to move here, whether people or businesses.
69. Because I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past 22 years, now.  And I love the place…
70. …but I hate what it’s turning into.  If I were a parent with a young family, I wouldn’t move to Saint Paul today.  I don’t know why anyone who didn’t have a vested interest in the current one-party system would.
71. Because single-party government is always bad.  Even if it’s your party.
72. Because “debate” over things like taxes and budgets in Saint Paul these days, with our one-party system, tends to devolve into acrimonious recriminations over who isn’t taxing or spending enough.
73. Because a city – really, any unit of government at any level – needs to have more than one viable party to keep those in power accountable.
74. And Saint Paul’s government, at this point in history, is accountable to nobody. 
75. Which means the future of this city is being planned pretty much by the un-tested, un-accountable whims of people who were elected to office out of force of habit…
76. …and those plans will become law…
77. …and affect the way this city will be for generations to come.  Think about it; Saint Paul is still paying for stupid decisions (“Urban Renewal”) made fifty years ago.  With the stakes as high as they are today, you think it’s going to get better?
78. Because Kathy Lantry needs someone to hold her accountable.
79. As does Dave Thune…
80. …and Lee Helgen…
81. …as well as Matt Stark…
82. …and Dan Bostrom.
83. Pat Harris too…
84. …not to mention Melvin Carter.  And while we can’t put any competitors on the City Council for another couple of years, you gotta start somewhere.
85. Because there are DFLers who respond to any dissent by chanting “we own this town!”
86. And that would irritate the piss out of me even if a Republican said it.  There’s a word for that – hubris.
87. And that kind of hubris needs to be brought back into line.
88. And keeping the status quo fat ‘n happy changes nothing.
89. Because when you put it all together – the hubris…
90. …the warped priorities (hockey rinks over firemen?)…
91. …the irresponsible policies…
92. …the scandalous peformormance and epic failure of our school system…
93. …and the sclerotic, bureaucratized, just-plain-dull agenda, and…
94. …boundless potential for corruption that attends any single-party government and bureaucracy, not to mention…
95. …a vision for the future that makes Cold-War era Berlin look positively scintillating…
96. …then the imperative to put John Krenik…
97. …Chris Conner…
98. …and Pat Igo on the school board…
99. and vote Eva Ng for mayor…
100. …is not just the only answer – but in fact it’s gotta be just the beginning.

See you at the polls tomorrow.  Bring a friend.  Have your friend bring a friend, too.

I’ll be joining a few thousand of our closest friends at the Minnesota Tea Party in a few hours. 

It’ll be at the Minnesota Capitol Grounds, starting around 5PM.  I’ll be joining a list of other speakers – Constitutional lawyer Marjorie Holsten, Doug Dahl, KLTK personality Sue Jeffers, Free market majordomo and AM1280 host David Strom, Healthcare reform powerhouse Twilia Brase, Dennis Madden, Doug Malsom, and KTLK-FM host Chris Baker, along with Bradlee Dean from “You Can Run International” and AM1280’s “Sons of Liberty”.  KKMS’ Lee Michaels hosts.

Me?  I’ll be speaking bright and early; just like when I was playing guitar in the bars, I’m the opening act.

And it’s gonna be fun!  See you there!

Back during the concealed carry debate in Minnesota, I can’t count the number of casually anti-reform people – including one DFL lobbyist/activist type who, while not an elected official, exerts a fairly hefty influence over politics in the Twin Cities – that I talked to who asked “why not require people to carry openly?  I mean, why not show people that you’re carrying?”

Which of course shows how screechingly ill-informed most anti-concealed carry activists are; the Minnesota Personal Protection Act allows people to carry openly.

But leaving aside the fact that requiring open carry would have the effect of tipping violent criminals off as to who was armed, most people who have permits don’t carry openly for the simple reason that “Gun” is a pretty powerful message.  In a generally-disarmed place like the Twin Cities, openly carrying a gun – completely legally – would be a little like walking around naked; it could be completely innocent, but at the very least it’d tend to dominate the conversation, and at the most could get people pretty upset. 

At this year’s annual Gun Rights picnic at the Harriett Bandshell, where dozens of utterly law-abiding citizens stood, ate and kibitzed, many of us carrying permitted firearms, a bystander was heard sputtering into a cell phone demanding a police response.  Now, it was a legal picnic full of legal people doing a legal activity, and someone had taken the liberty of telling the police what was going on, so nothing happened.  But as a general rule, keeping guns out the way among crowds that might not necessarily be with the good guys is considered tactful.  At least.

Just because you can openly carry your firearm doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Now, when you mix guns and politics?  The messages are even more pronounced.  The symbolism gets through to even SEIU members.

Make no mistake about it; government needs to know that the people do in fact have the final veto, should they get genuinely out of line – suspending the Constitution, abrogating democracy, descending into genuine tyranny.  And the government should know that each and every one of us gun-owning citizens is not going to be giving up our Second Amendment rights without a fight – and that fight will be rhetorical and political, God willing, as long as we do have a functioning democracy.

But at a town hall meeting? Oh, I get the idea – but it’s a bad plan.  While you may be trying to express “Don’t Tread On Me”, there are those – mostly, but not entirely, from the pants-wetting class – who will take it as “I’m Treading On You”.  Which is the last impression one wants to leave people with in a civil society.

So while I get the idea, the fact is that Obama hasn’t suspended the constitution.  Oh, he and his Chicago-like administration are playing fast and loose with a lot of our rights, and they need watching. 

When when you’re talking town hall meetings – notwithstanding the fact that when congresspeople and the President are involved are usually really just decorative window-dressing when it comes to “participatory democracy” – leave the guns at home.  Even if you’re legal (as all the people in the incidents two weeks ago were).

We need to force the President and his dupes to stay on subject. 

Sometimes, I wonder what things that we accept as normal today, that would have been considered paranoia a few years ago?

Why?

Just because.

…in the age of Obama:

Know your place, you racist teabagging peasant!