The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel – which seems to have done a fair job of covering the Wisconsin Fleebaggers – has busted an SEIU hack bragging that the Milwaukee media was complicit with the union in trying to smear then-candidate and now-governor Scott Walker.

Using his cell phone, a Walker campaign staffer recorded a 15-minute talk in which Morgan laid out what he said were his union’s plans to tie the problems at the O’Donnell Park garage and the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex to the Republican nominee.

The Walker aide, Michael Brickman, didn’t disclose who he was during the one-on-one chat. He gave a false name and occupation at the end of the conversation… The union staffer bragged about his ability to garner news coverage of his anti-Walker events from local TV stations, which he called “willing partners” in his endeavors. He also disclosed that he secretly runs an anti-Walker blog at www.scottwalkertruthsquad.org, which prominently features Weishan and SEIU’s criticisms of the county exec.

Via Dan Riehl, a partial transcript (full transcript available in PDF form here):

2: I work for a union. I work for the Service Employees Union.

1: S…E?

2: SEIU. It’s a big janitors union based in Chicago.

2: Yeah, I do political lobbying, communications work, research and media.

1: Oh, so you’re like big time in this thing.

2: I’m kinda at the center of like a maelstrom right now in terms of kicking Scott Walker’s ass. I’ve been

kicking Scott Walker’s ass for two months now. We’ve been on TV; we’ve done all kinds of stuff.

1: You guys did TV?

2: No, We just get Channel 4 to come down with their news cameras and just a …. do news.

1: They seem like they do a pretty good job covering you guys.

2: Pretty good. You’ve seen that stuff?

1: Well just like the anti-Walker stuff.

2: Yeah, they’ve been really willing partners in it. They come in with the TV cameras and (channels) 58,

12 come, and 6 doesn’t always. But yeah, they’ve been really helpful. They think it’s fun.

1: Do they get the message? Do you think they agree with you?

2: Sometimes. It’s not perfect, but yeah, they get our message across.

1: [inaudible]

This, if it pans out, should be placed alongside “JournoList” as prime evidence in the indictment of the mainstream media on charges of liberal bias from the top down.

Courtesy of XKCD, here‘s one of my favorite comic strips ever:

I think about it every time a DFL chantingpointbot starts talking about things like “proof” and “evidence”.

Which brings us to this piece in MNPublius, which gurgitates one of the most alarmingly cynical memes the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) are trying to foist on the less-literate:

It’s been well-documented that cuts to local government aid cause property taxes to rise.

Now, I spent the weekend going through the text of every piece of legislation that led to a freeze, reallocation or cut in Local Government Aid in the past ten years [1], looking for a passage that read like “Local Governments are required to raise taxes to make up for the change in the aid formula”.

Because there is none.

Local Government Aid, for the umpteenth time, was originally intended to redistribute money state tax money to poor outstate school districts and cities, so that towns like Hibbing could rebuild old schools, or Thief River Falls could have a waste-water treatment plant, or Osage could get a new police car.

It’s become a vehicle for the state’s largest (and most DFL-addled) cities, Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth, to launder their own rapacious spending throug the state budget without having to account to city and county taxpayers.

My own analysis ([in the original MNPublius posting – Ed]) shows that property taxes have steadily risen as state aid has dropped.

But Jeff’s piece doesn’t show where the causation, the coercion, the cause is.  Because yes – as Local Government Aid has slowed, cities have had to decide whether to make their own tax base cover the difference, or to do without.  Some cities, like west-metro Mound (which hasn’t gotten LGA in years) made the tough choices, cut the budgets, and learned to make do.

Others, like Minneapolis and Saint Paul and Brainerd – addled by DFL mayors and/or city councils – raised property taxes by far more than the cuts to LGA.

At any rate – Rosenberg’s premise , that “cuts to LGA force property tax hikes”, is a canard, a shrill chanting point that is based in no fact whatsoever.

A local government can opt to keep taxes rock-steady no matter what happens to LGA, and trim what’s needed; they can also make the case to their citizens and taxpayers to keep paying the bills that were formerly paid by taxpayers around the rest of the state, and let the chips fall come election time; in cities like Mound, it’s a dodgy proposition; in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the DFL will keep getting elected no matter what.

There’s a simple reason for that: Cities provide essential services that residents don’t want cut. So instead of cutting back on public safety or filling potholes, local governments are forced to make up for lost revenues by increasing property taxes.

There’s a non-sequitur there – one the DFL is counting on The People not to notice; cities do provide essential services.  They also provide plenty of non-essentials.  In Saint Paul, I pay for the best urban fire department in the US; I’m happy to do it.  We have a decent police department; there’s room for improvement, but they’d OK.

We have a lot of libraries. I love libraries – I practically grew up in one.  But as libraries become home to fewer and fewer books, it pains me to say we could perhaps do with just a tad fewer of them and not make them any less available.

We have a public works department.  I pay them to fill in potholes.  They get to it – eventually.  Clearly there is fat to be cut here. They also plow the streets.  They do an adequate job – one that could easily be privatized, along with many other city-paid services.

We have a park and rec department. I love parks. I love recreation.  The city has dozens of “Community Centers” which serve as public service catchalls for every variety of recreation and social program imaginable.  There would seem to be room for some consolidation.  And frankly, mowing the grass in the parks could be cut waaaay back.

I also pay for a city Human Rights office that fully duplicates the functions of the Ramsey County and State human rights offices, all located within a few blocks of each other in downtown Saint Paul. I pay for a mayoral staff with nineteen along with a phalanx of assistants and other hangers-on.

Could any of these be trimmed before we start laying off cops and firemen?  I think so.

Will it happen?  In Saint Paul, probably not. For all the Mayor’s whinging, the city’s government-dependence-addled electorate will likely increase property taxes to cover whatever they lose from LGA.  Most of the people who care about tax rates have already fled the cities to places with more responsible, responsive governments.

Now – if you live in a city with a more responsible government, the answer may be different.  The mayor may not be able to justify the expense.

But it’s a matter of choice.  Not “force”, as Jeff, the media and the DFL (pardon the redundancy) would like you to think.

Fortunately, the MNGOP has a “solution” for that: take away the right of local governments to make their own decisions and force them to cut essential services. That’s the impact of HF481, a bill by House Republicans that would make local governments’ budget decisions for them by outlawing any property tax increases in the 2012 fiscal year.

That sounds nice, except for one thing — if property taxes are frozen, that means services must be cut. Apparently, an all-cuts budget that slashes $6.2 billion in state funding for things like education isn’t good enough for the MNGOP. They want to force your city government to cut even more services.

The merits of HF481 notwithstanding – it’s worth a discussion – Rosenberg’s wrong.  Not all “services” are essential.  We, the taxpayers of our DFL=-addled cities, can do without $50,000 drinking fountains and misappropriation of city staff to political ends and all the other worthless patronage our cities pay for.

The point is, cuts in LGA do not lead inexorably to property tax hikes.  It is entirely voluntary – dependent entirely on the addiction of local government to spending, their success in selling those compensatory hikes to their voters, and how fed-up the voters are.

Why should voters in Bemidji pay for Saint Paul’s human rights office?

(more…)

The Wisconsin teachers union publishes the names of and home addresses of state legislators:

WEAC has provided a list on their website of the home addresses for all legislators set to vote on the Governors plan.  The link which takes a user to this list only states that it has “Phone Numbers & Email Addresses” however a quick glance at the list proves otherwise.

The WI GOP grabbed the screen shot.

I’m sure it’s just for purposes of writing letters.

Nudge, nudge.

Bring video cameras.  Lots of them.  And don’t interact with a “union” protester without at least one camera on you.

Because yesterday, the unions and the other organizations leading the protests were warning their members “not to be provoked” by the Tea Party counterprotesters.

And you know Berg’s Seventh Law:

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

Or planned misdeeds.

So keep those cameras spinning.  Because the media will hang everything that goes wrong on you, and you know it.

Jesse Jackson on the Wisconsin union protests, with emphasis added:

Civil Rights activist Jesse Jackson led protesters Friday at the Capitol in civil rights-era chants and called the protest over Gov. Scott Walker’s union cuts “a real Martin Luther King moment.”

Black people who’d  been kept as slaves and/or second class citizens for 400 years vs. people who are treated as better than regular citizens, who earn more than their private sector counterparts, per capita.

People whose rights and humanity had been systematically stripped from them for a dozen generations vs. people whose rights and humanity the system put above private sector workers for fifty years.

People who had dogs and water canons sicced on them for demanding their rights vs. people who’ve gotten an adoring media tongue bath for demanding to be kept

People whose color was used to make them less than human vs. people whose union cards made them more important than democracy itself, to the Wisconsin Senate Democrat caucus.

Yep.  Just like Martin Luther King.

I’ve seen a few liberals on Twitter chuckling that the Madison protests are “like the Tea Party”.

No.  These protests are like King George III protesting against his subjects.

…I don’t recall seeing these pictures in the mainstream media’s gauzy, soft-focus coverage of the Madison, Wisconsin union members’ “keep paying us or else” demonstrations today:

This one?  Nope – not this one either:

But remember, conservatives – no vitriol!

Having lost the majority in both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature and the governor’s mansion – by the choice of Wisconsin’s voters – Wisconsin’s Senate “Democrat”ic caucus fled the state yesterday to a resort in Illinois, rather than do their job.

In doing so, they disenfranchised a majority of Wisconsin voters.

It is, in effect, a coup-d’etat.

The full weight of law enforcement should be used to round these puling rodents up and haul them back to Madison, first to lose the legal vote on the collective bargaining measure, and then for investigation leading to prosecution for whatever charges the State of Wisconsin gives to those who try to unlawfully seize control of the state’s rightful government and violate the will of the voters.

In his inaugural budget this past Tuesday, Mark Dayton declared it our duty to pay any price, to bear any burden…

…to help government avoid any form of discomfort whatsoever.

We conservatives have been warning of the inevitable ends of this philosophy for years – decades, really.

But it’s not remotely hypothetical.  We can see the wages of putting a profligate, unresponsive state’s wants ahead of everything else.  It’s two states to the east – in Chicago.

Chicago – a high-tax, high-“service” city – is shrinking.  Fast:

After peaking at 3.62 million people in 1950, Chicago underwent a half century of decline that ended only when the 1990s boom years produced a small gain in the 2000 count. At that time, the city loudly celebrated its comeback.

But the recent recession accelerated a migration both to the metropolitan area’s farthest suburbs and to the Southern U.S. Chicago nonetheless is expected to remain the nation’s third-largest city, behind New York and Los Angeles and just ahead of Houston, for which final census numbers aren’t in yet.

The only answer, obviously, is racism:

The exodus took a big chunk out of the city’s black population in particular, shrinking it to 887,608 from 1,065,009, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

“The black decline is really powering the city loss,” Mr. Frey said, calling it “part of the great reverse migration to the South.”

Blacks remain the most-populous race in Chicago, Mr. Frey said, while the number of whites fell during the decade by about 52,000 to just under 855,000 and Hispanics’ ranks rose by about 25,000 to just below 780,000.

The population of Cook County, which is dominated by the city of Chicago, fell 3.4% during the decade. But it remained by far the state’s most populous county, with about 5.2 million people.

And yes, there is a conservative angle to it:

The explosive growth of suburbs far outside Chicago produced huge gains in neighboring counties. Kane County grew by 27.5%, Will County by nearly 35% and Lake County by 9.2%, while DuPage grew a more modest 1.4%.

This population shift to traditionally conservative counties could alter the balance of power in both the state house and the Illinois congressional delegation.

The influx of residents to outlying areas could translate into additional Republican seats, though the arrival there of Chicagoans—particularly minorities—could make those regions more politically diverse. For instance, said University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson, “DuPage County could become less Republican.” Mr. Johnson said his analysis of census data showed that metropolitan Chicago grew 4% to 9,683,000 people.

Overall, the population of Illinois grew slightly, to 12.8 million from 12.4 million. Among its fast-growing cities, Aurora expanded by 38.4%, Naperville by 10.5% and Joliet by 38.8%. In something of a surprise, Rockford—currently beset by double-digit unemployment—actually grew by 1.8%. The growth of the industrial city, which was ravaged by the early 1980s recession, may reflect the city’s efforts since then to diversify its manufacturing-based economy.

So let’s break this down:

Conservatism wins.  Statism loses.

(Or at least conservatism wins the parts that aren’t going to decamp to Wisconsin)

In the comment section of yesterday’s post about the Wisconsin Public Employees’ Unions protests against Govenor Walker’s bill to elminate collective bargaining, regular commenter “Terry” wrote something I think every Conservative group in American that faces a similar fight should put on T-shirts and picket signs:

I, for one, will not work until I am 70 so public employees can retire at 55.

Not that Governor Dayton wants to give lil’ ol’ me any choice in the matter.

Groups?  Start printing.

For want of 8,000 more votes…

Scott Walker is doing what governments at every level should do – ending collective bargaining for public union employees :

Gov. Scott Walker said Friday that he wants to end collective bargaining for nearly all public employees because the state is broke and there’s no point negotiating with the unions when there is nothing to offer.

Union leaders and Democrats, powerless to stop Walker’s plan from passing the Republican-controlled Legislature next week, were reeling. They blasted the proposal as a naked power-grab that will gut Wisconsin’s deep organized labor tradition and result in layoffs that devastate the economy.

If I were a Wisconsin taxpayer – and a place in Hudson is looking better and better every time I look at the Dayton “budget” – I’d say “screw your tradition”.

As to the layoffs?  If the jobs aren’t actually needed to run the state’s government, then why are we paying them?  Why is a public-sector job more sacrosanct than a private sector one?

Walker, a Republican who took office in January, argued that his proposal is an alternative to ordering furlough days and laying off 12,000 state and local public employees over the next two years to balance a $3.6 billion budget shortfall.

“The state’s broke,” Walker said. “Local governments are broke. They don’t have anything to offer.”

Walker wants to remove all collective-bargaining rights, except for salary, for roughly 175,000 public employees starting July 1. Any requests for a salary increase higher than the consumer price index would have to be approved by referendum.

He also wants – gasp – to require   public employees to pay half the cost of their gold-plated public employee pensions, and pay 12.5% of their healthcare costs.

I caught MPR’s coverage of the protests “sweeping” Wisconsin today.  Standout note – a Minnesota public-employee union leadership stooge whinging that the changes will “cost union employees’ …”

I was ready for the next word to be “jobs”.

“…money toward their retirement”.

I wished, fervently, that I could have met that woman face to face, and showed her what I – a self-employed guy – pay for retirement.

8.000 more freaking votes.

Another example of the absurdity of our idiot school system; a black woman, tired of her neighborhood’s wretched school system, tried to get her children a better education.

She was one of about 100 families investigated – but Kelley Williams-Bolar committed the greatest crime there is, in the eyes of soulless administrations; she fought back.

And now she’s in jail:

“It’s overwhelming. I’m exhausted,” she said. “I did this for them, so there it is. I did this for them.”

Williams-Bolar decided four years ago to send her daughters to a highly ranked school in neighboring Copley-Fairlawn School District.

But it wasn’t her Akron district of residence, so her children were ineligible to attend school there, even though her father lived within the district’s boundaries.

Ohio has an open enrollment policy – but it grants a lot of latitude to schools as to whether or not they (and their tax bases) will participate.

The school district accused Williams-Bolar of lying about her address, falsifying records and, when confronted, having her father file false court papers to get around the system.

Williams-Bolar said she did it to keep her children safe and that she lived part-time with her dad.

“When my home got broken into, I felt it was my duty to do something else,” Williams-Bolar said.

There’s a reason that black families are the most enthusiastic supporters of charter schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul; schools in inner city neighborhoods are that bad.

And here’s a statement you can just hear coming out of the mouth of some DFL hamster, can’t you?

While her children are no longer attending schools in the Copley-Fairlawn District, school officials said she was cheating because her daughters received a quality education without paying taxes to fund it.

“Those dollars need to stay home with our students,” school district officials said.

Yep.  I hear it.

Dire Straits’ single “Money For Nothing” was one of the iconic songs of the 1980s when it came out in 1985.  Chock full of reference to MTV and the styles of the era, and featuring a video that was fairly bleeding-edge computer animation (albeit very, very stylized) for the time.

It also created a brouhaha; the original, album version included a naughty word; three times, in fact.  “The little f***ot in the earring and the makeup?  Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair…” and so on.    As songwriter, singer and guitar legend Mark Knopfler said at the time, the entire song was written in the second person, and was a conversation between a couple of delivery guys at a furniture store in New York, commenting on the MTV videos they were watching during the glory days of big new-wave hairdos.

It’s been a quarter century – but the controversy is baaaaaaack:

Classic Dire Straits track Money for Nothing has been banned from public broadcast in Canada – after receiving just one complaint 25 years after its release.

The global hit single came out on the band’s iconic fifth album, Brothers in Arms, in May 1985 and won a Grammy for best rock performance the following year.

But the original version included the word “faggot” referring to homosexuals, and although a cleaned-up edition was made available, Oz-FM in Newfoundland played the first edition in February last year.

The result was a single complaint – but the self-regulating Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has upheld it, and no outlet in the nation can now play Money for Nothing the way Dire Straits intended it to be heard.

The complaint said: “Money for Nothing was aired and included the word ‘faggot’ a total of three times. I am aware of other versions of the song and yet Oz-FM chose to play and not censor the version I am complaining about. As a member of the LGBT community I feel there is no reason for such discriminatory remarks to be played on air.”

And that’s all she wrote – notwithstanding that this is a very, very old rhubarb:

Dire Straits mainman Mark Knopfler has fielded angry reaction to the lyrics since the song first came out. He has pointed out the song is written from the viewpoint of a stupid character who thinks musicians make their “money for nothing” and his stupidity is what leads him to make ignorant statements.

Speaking in 1985 he said: “Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you have to be direct. I’m in two minds as to whether it’s a good idea to take on characters and write songs that aren’t in the first person.”

Now, I’m not bringing this up because it’s a great case of PC run amok – although it is.

And I’m not bringing it up because it’s a great example of the lunacy of Canadian “Human Rights” law – although, again, it is.

I’m bringing it up because it’s the shape of things to come, if Julius “Seizure” Genachowski and Representative James Clyburn want with all their proposed interventions into the First Amendment – from the “Fairness Doctrine” to “Net Neutrality”; they want, and if not stopped they will get, a system where the First Amendment will be subject to the tastes, whims and tantrums of those who complain the loudest.

Alan Cross of Canadian service ExploreMusic comments: “The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is run by Canada’s private broadcasters. In exchange for the government not meddling, broadcasters have long promised to regulate themselves.

“It’s seen as much preferable to the arrangement in the US where the FCC – a government organization run by political appointees – carries a very heavy hammer when it comes to regulating broadcast content; or in the UK where Ofcom plays a similar role.

“In Canada, if no one complains, the feeling is that there’s no need to censor it. But all it takes is one person making one complaint for the entire apparatus of the CBSC to come to full gallop.

All of the proposals to return the “Fairness Doctrine” involve returning a frightening degree (if you care about free speech) of control over broadcast licensing to pressure from citizens – and not even a lot of them; organization will count for more than numbers, just as it did before 1987.

The little jagoffs with the suits and the Yale ties?  Yeah, buddy – they want control.

The Democrats nationwide are holding a pair of sevens with a king high.  In Minnesota, the DFL’s holding a couple of four and nothing much more.

As they say in law school (or so I’m told) if the facts are against you, argue the law.  If the law is against you, argue facts.  If both are against you, argue like hell.

The climate is against the Dems (suspect polling about “voters wanting centrism” notwithstanding).  They just lost big in one of the most epic two-year turnarounds in electoral history.  They stand, quite possibly (if the GOP doesn’t screw up) to lose the Senate in 2012, and maybe the Presidency to boot (although it’s way too early to even feel to optimistic yet; we have a ways to go). They are gathered behind a very weak president whose primary platform has been “I’m not George W. Bush”, yet whose only successful policies were cribbed from his predecessor.

The facts – the electorate – are against them.  The “law” – time, really, in the form of the a huge number of Senators coming up for re-election in 2012 – is against them.

So they’re going to argue like hell.

And at this, the Dems have some huge advantages; a compliant and in-the-bag media, a huge public class, and masses of voters, especially in big cities, who are dependent on government either as employees or clients.

My prediction:  Look for the Dems, nationwide and in Minnesota, to start pushing a series of memes – I’ve been calling them “chanting points” on this blog, and having a lot of fun with it – to try to give the media and their sound-bite-addled acolytes something to chant.

Here are my predictions:

“Tea Baggers Are Teh Crazee”:  That one’s already started; Jerry Nadler’s outburst yesterday (accompanied by some too-perfectly-timed media appearances by the likes of Dahlia Lithwick) on the “Fetishization of the Constitution” is a part of this; trying to frame constitutional originalism as some form of snake handling.  Watch for this meme to work its way down through Media Matters and the leftyblogs (pardon the redundancy), through Jon Stewart and the lefty chattering classes (ibid), and countless editorial pages.  Because actually showing that originalism actually is a pseudo-religious fetish isn’t important; creating the impression is.

“Disagreement Equals Disintegration”: Look for any disagreement among the conservative bloc – which is not a bloc, but a coalition of social and fiscal conservatives and newly-minted libertarians – to be portrayed as “the disintegration of the Tea Party”.  Look for rumors of the disintegration of the Tea Party to crash ashore about Wednesday of every news week.   Because the disintegration isn’t important; creating the impression that it is, is.

“There Is a Huge, Throbbing Center Out there”:  We saw a dress rehearsal of this in Minnesota, where the media set up Tom Horner as a viable “centrist Republican”, notwithstanding the fact that his policies fit in better as a moderate DFLer.  All through the summer, the DFL and media (PTR) tried to put purple lipstick on the blue pig.  Did Horner take 8,000 votes away from Emmer?  We will never know – but the tactic is the important part.  We’re seeing this already; the very days the new US House and Minnesota Legislature were sworn in, the media trumpeted polls of dubious geneology claiming the American People were begging for more centrism.  And you know how polls work these days.

More?

Discuss.

Since Glenn Maxham – former TV news editor-turned-moral-scold of the Tea Party – wants a “list of enumerated freedoms that We The People have lost” so that we angry peasants’ complaints satisfy his own rigorous standards for standing (he was a tourist in the USSR, doncha know), I just thought I’d let him know i’m on the job.  Because they’re popping up all over the place, like this DUI Dragnet in Florida:

Florida is among several states now holding what are called “no refusal” checkpoints.

It means if you refuse a breath test during a traffic stop, a judge is on site, and issues a warrant that allows police to perform a mandatory blood test.

It’s already being done in several counties, and now Unfried is working to bring it to the Tampa Bay area.

“I think you’ll see the difference because people will not drink and drive. I truly believe that,” she said.

Not everyone is on board, though.

DUI defense attorney Kevin Hayslett sees the mandatory blood test as a violation of constitutional rights.

“It’s a slippery slope and it’s got to stop somewhere,” Hayslett explained, “what other misdemeanor offense do we have in the United States where the government can forcefully put a needle into your arm?”

The federal government says Florida has among the highest rates of breathalyzer refusal.

That’d be the Fourth Amendment being torched there, Mr. Maxham.

Indeed – Mothers Against Drunk Driving has become one of the most insidious attackers of liberty in this nation.  Other enemies – Janet Napolitano, Julius “Seizure” Genachowski – come and go with different political waves.  But MADD is always there, through “up” and “down” waves in civil liberty, always there to sap more of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments (and keep the police chasing after ever-more revenue, at the expense of all other law enforcement), no matter who’s in office.

But we’re not done yet, Mr. Maxham!

It was 2008…

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party had been waiting since the 1960s for its next great political opening

Democrats achieved 60 Senate votes by an historical accident of prosecutorial abuse (Ted Stevens), a stolen election (Al Franken) and a betrayal (Arlen Specter). They then attempted to do nearly everything we expected, regardless of public opinion, and they only stopped because the clock ran out.

The real story of 2010 is that the voters were finally able to see and judge this liberal agenda in its unvarnished form. For once, there was no Republican President to muddle the message or divide the accountability. The public was able to compare the promise of 8% unemployment if the government spent $812 billion on “stimulus” with the 9.8% jobless result. They stood athwart liberal history in the making and said, “Stop.”

…and that was November of 2010.

Read the rest here.

I was born 17 years after the Holocaust ended was shut down by American, Soviet, British and Free French troops.

I’d say “Genocide is a bad thing”.  But then Glenn Maxham of Duluth would get mad at me.

Who is Maxham? I dunno.  He’s a guy who claims to have “worked for three decades as a radio and television news director in the Twin Ports”, but all I really know about him is that he wrote a letter to the editor of the Duluth News Tribune.

For me, the strident pleas of right-wing dissidents to get government off our backs has a hollow ring, and I conjecture it comes from those unlikely to have personally experienced life in a nation under a truly oppressive regime. I have done so several times.

Hm.  That brings a whole new tilt to the study of right and wrong.

After all, I’ve never been gang-raped, had Muscular Dystrophy, been robbed at gunpoint, been swindled out of my life’s savings, had my family killed by machete-wielding ethnic extremists, had a bad overdose on adulterated cocaine, or killed anyone in a car crash, but I know I really don’t want any of them to happen.

Do I have the moral standing to believe that?  What gives one that sort of moral standing?

After spending a month in the old Soviet Union and in later visits to its puppet states of Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, I witnessed the cruel, unjust use of power firsthand that made me realize the wealth of freedoms we enjoy to the fullest here in the U.S.

Ah.  So being a tourist in places where bad things are happening gives one that standing!  Experiencing a little of something bad qualifies one to criticize it!  Now we’re getting somewhere!

So – if someone kisses me under the mistletoe by surprise, get a bad cold, have to scrape graffiti off my garbage can, see my property taxes go up, get called “a white male”, spend a day recovering from some “off” chicken or knock over my neighbor’s garbage can, then I have standing to inveigh against rape, MD, blue and white collar crime, genocide, drugs or drunk driving?

But not until?

OK. I”m still confused.

At age 20 I was drafted during the Korean conflict. I spent nearly two years overseas, compensated with the GI Bill, which allowed me to finish college at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Now well into my retirement years, I live a comfortable life with the help of Social Security and Medicare. I am free to express my political views and free to travel anywhere in our 50 states without checking in with police at the borders to verify my identity and to provide details of my travel plans.

By contrast, I had my camera confiscated in the Soviet Union because I took a picture of still-frozen rivers in July while flying over Siberia. In Stargard, Poland, I was briefly jailed after a person in my party violated an inane law prohibiting pictures of train stations. In all of the Iron Curtain counties I had to leave my passport and room key at the hotel as a guarantee I would not stray outside the city. I was followed wherever I went, and my suitcase examined in each new hotel when I was not in my room. You get the picture.

Well, maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.

So  – until I take a trip through, say, Burma, I shouldn’t complain about military dictatorships?

Here at home, I’m growing increasingly weary of vague charges that we must “take back our country,” that liberals are legislating away freedoms and in general trashing our government, charges that are vacuous at best.

Now, I’m still confused, and I’m facing a bit of a dilemma.  If I make the “charges” less “vague” and “vacuous”, will Mr. Maxham get more “weary”?  Not having had my camera confiscated or my belongings fluffed by the ZOMO, do I have standing or leave to address the isssue?  Or should I go rent a Pole?

By Mr. Maxham’s leave, I’ll take a swing at it.

Rarely, if ever, have I seen an enumeration of denied freedoms by the malcontents. What specifically are those who call for a “restoration of freedoms lost” talking about? Cite examples.

Now we’re getting somewhere!  He’s missed the list of freedoms we’ve lost and want back!

I’ll run down a quick list, in Amendment order – risking, as I do, Mr. Maxham’s wrath for commenting about Constitutional Freedoms without having had the entire Constitution suspended:

First Amendment: The FCC is working to establish “Net Neutrality”, which will eventually lead to censorship via the back door; they’ve also been working on getting the “Fairness Doctrine” back into effect.  If you speak out against a TSA goon, you stand a good chance of being arrested on specious grounds.  Campaign finance laws in effect ration speech (both in the “speech is money” sense of the term as well as finding ways to interpret literal “speech” as campaign contributions. Our freedom of religion and association are both under attack with “civil rights” groups sueing landlords who want to rent to coreligionists; there is legitimate concern that if gay marriage is legalized, US courts will follow the Canadian example and prosecute churches that refuse to recognize the practice.  Freedom of association is under further attack by lawsuits that prevent groups from choosing their memberships in even harmless ways.  In many states, recording the police, even in the Campus speech codes make “free speech” a choosy thing.  The Federal Election Commission is still working on ways to regulate blogs.  And there is a significant movement in government (including Keith Ellison) that wants to subsidize – in effect, nationalize – newspapers.

Second Amendment:  Most major cities still crimp the rights of the law-abiding citizen to keep and bear arms, as do a few states.  They adopt gun control laws that don’t inhibit crime, but make citizens criminals for exercising their constitutional rights. States enact arbitrary and unrealistic laws government self-defense, which in effect criminalize perfectly legitimate behavior in self-defense, on largely political and ideological grounds.   Classes of firearms are prohibited due to arbitrary, purely cosmetic and PR issues.  (Or is Mr. Maxham only concerned about the freedoms he values?  I gotta ask…)

Third Amendment:  OK, so far so good.

Fourth Amendment:  Police can seize and sell property on accusation for drug charges – not conviction.  Cities can use extralegal administrative/non-judicial means to seize property – or merely devalue it to the point of untenability – and remove residents on purely political grounds.   Property rights are routinely and constantly infringed by administrative edicts from government bureaus – pollution control, transit, economic development, zoning and other government bureaux.   Oh, and the TSA can grab your junk, and if you say “boo”, they’ll throw you in Guantanamo.

Fifth Amendment:   With allegations of sexual assault and domestic abuse, “guilt until proven innocent” is becoming the rule.   Citizens accused of drunk driving are routinely deprived of Fourth Amendment rights.  County social service agencies have immense extrajudicial power to intervene in family situations – sometimes needed, but other times either in error, or in conjunction with the designs of other agencies.

Ninth and Tenth Amendments:  The courts have let the Commerce Clause serve as a catchall to empower government regulation; the powers of the States and People – on property and land rights issues, election issues, education, healthcare and many other issues – have been sucked into the bureaucratic vortex.

General Economic Liberty: Government actions are subjecting me, my kids, my grandkids and my great grandkids to a mountain of debt.  When one is indebted against one’s own will, one is not free.  Here or in East Germany.

That was about five minutes’ work.  I’d continue, but I bet Mr. Maxham is getting “increasingly weary”.

No doubt many are well-meaning but are woefully misguided and seem to labor under the impression that, to be a genuine patriot, one must hate liberals and be anti-government.

Whoah, there, bigfella!  Where did “hate” come into this?

At the risk of “increasingly wearying” Mr. Maxham, since when does honest, spirited dissent, and trying to keep our government in check, equal “hate?”

By Mr. Maxham’s “logic”, when I tell my kids they can not build a skateboard park in my backyard (with my money!), that’s “hatred”.

I’d hope even Mr. Maxham could see that logic; if I need to translate it into Polish to give it more of that authentic eclat, I’d be happy to help out.

The health of our democracy depends upon having a healthy, effective, two-party system.

Now, I learned Latin in high school, not in ancient Rome – ha ha! – but I know a “non sequitur” when I see one.

There are, and always will be, many shortcomings in our system that need improvement.

Right.  The question is – do we have the right to address them, if we have never been tourists in the USSR?

Mr. Maxham, I’m here to help.  Please – send an enumerated list of people who you’d allow to protest against US government policy.

But when viewed in a comparative sense, our government ranks among the best in the world.

And a lot of us just want to keep it that way.   And once we know who Mr. Maxham would allow to work on that, we’ll get right down to business!

I fail to believe the negative tactics of the Tea Party, and its ultra-conservative sympathizers, can improve upon it.

All kidding aside, Mr. Maxham, why would you think anyone would care what you think about how we, The People, exercise our First Amendment rights to try to make our country a better place and keep our freedoms from eroding further than they have?

What – besides a tour to the Warsaw Pact – would have ever given you the impression that your dismissal of our efforts, and our exercise of our rights, had any merit at all?

Glenn Maxham worked for three decades as a radio and television news director in the Twin Ports.

Oh.

New York’s snow-plowing disaster was apparently a union labor slowdown, says the NYPost:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

Allowing government workers to unionize has always been a stupid idea, but that cow’s pretty much left the barn.  For now.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

With unions/Democrats (pardon the redundancy) at a low ebb nationwide, look for a lot more of this.

And bear in mind, I have nothing against unions.  Just as companies and producers and wholesalers try to work the market for their products to their advantage in a free market, so should labor.  Unlike most DFLers, I’ve actually been a union member.

But when unions control government – as they do in places like, well, the Twin Cities – this is what you get; public safety is a chip in the collective bargaining stakes.

Patrick Ruffini unpacks the real conclusion to be drawn from this week’s census and reapportionment numbers:

[T]his week’s numbers were the most ringing endorsement of the Republican governing model since Rudy Giuliani towered over the vested interests in New York City. Not only did the South and West win — which liberals will dismiss as a function of weather — but low tax states consistently beat high tax states. Not only did conservative states beat liberal states, most tellingly, the winners were almost to a man conservatively governed.

Consider this striking fact unearthed by political strategist (and former Giuliani adviser) Ken Kurson, posted on Facebook:

• Avg tax rate in states gaining a Congressional seat: 2.8%
• Avg tax rate in states losing a Congressional seat: 6.05%

People vote with their feet.

And not entirely because of the weather, although that’ll be what the left attributes the reapportionment to.  Minnesota – which held onto both its eighth house seat for another ten years by the skin of its teeth (perhaps thanks to the fact it held on to fiscal sanity by the same margin) – grew 4%, well off the national average.   North Dakota – which has low taxes and is actively cutting the ones they have – grew by 5%, and income-tax-free South Dakota grew even faster, leading the region.  

Ruffini (with emphasis added):

This finding is relevant to top marginal tax rates, which unlike property or sales taxes more prevalent in redder states punish creation rather than consumption, but the basic finding runs deep throughout the numbers. The big population winners did not just happen to red states with nice weather. They also had a deeply embedded Republican governing model. Consider who governed in the big population-gaining states this year.

• Texas +4 (10 years of Republican governors, 0 Democrat)
• Florida +2 (10 Republican, 0 Democrat)
• Nevada +1 (10 Republican, 0 Democrat)
• Utah +1 (10 Republican, 0 Democrat)
• South Carolina +1 (8 Republican, 2 Democrat)
• Georgia +1 (8 Republican, 2 Democrat)
• Arizona +1 (2 Republican, 8 Democrat)
• Washington +1 (0 Republican, 10 Democrat)

Collectively, that’s 58 years of Republican governance to 22 years of Democratic governance in the states gaining Congressional seats. And Washington State’s impressive record — alone among true blue states — likely had more to do with the little matter that it lacks an income tax, and an initiative this year to impose one was beat back by 2-to-1.

Ruffini notes that the major left-strangled metropolitan areas – the New Yorks and Bostons and Los Angeleses – continued to show some growth; there are benefits to having a large, established commercial sector (or whatever’s left of it) and a throbbing creative class. 

But the reapportionment shows that they only go so far.

Fifty more years of coastal-liberal strangulation and the Democrats just might be a third party yet after all.

The FCC – led by Julius “Caesar” Genachowski – is voting on its first “Net Neutrality” rules:

Contentious Internet traffic rules facing a vote next week are likely to be adopted without radically veering from a proposal unveiled earlier in the month, telecommunications policy analysts said on Wednesday.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote on Dec. 21 on whether to adopt regulations that ban the blocking of lawful traffic but allow Internet service providers to ration Web traffic on their networks.

So now the Internet – developed from a scientists’ and academics’ toy by immense private-sector investment – is now under government control.

And if the FCC is now telling service providers what they can’t block, then it’s a short step to them saying what they must block.

It’s the camel’s nose in the tent.

Common Cause Minnesota  (CCM) is a “non-partisan” PAC that exists, in its entirety, to advance liberal causes and, when they can’t manage that, to retard conservative ones.

Oh, they tart the message up like a twenty-dollar hooker:  “Common Cause Minnesota is a nonprofit, nonpartisan citizen’s lobby dedicated to improving the way state government operates. We have helped pass Minnesota’s most important ethics and campaign finance reforms“, is what they say on their website.  And everywhere, in all their communication – transparency.  Transparency, transparancy, transparency.  They want “Transparency” in government.  Or so they say.

We’ll come back to that.

As I pointed out last September, in the wake of  finding out that “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” was spending an avalanche of funding from not-so-transparent sources like Mark Dayton, his ex-wife and a slew of unions, through via a fiscal shell game that Derek Brigham mapped out as well as anyone – certainly better than anyone in the mainstream media…

…Common Cause had demanded an investigation of…

…Campaign for Minnesota’s future, and a donation it got from the Republican Governors Assocation.

And for this campaign, Common Cause went big, going to the state Campaign Finance Board.

CCM’s announcement certainly set the stakes high (emphasis added by me):

WHAT:           Common Cause has uncovered an elaborate scheme by three entities to hide political contributions.

WHEN:           Thursday, September 30, 2010
11:00 a.m.

WHERE:         Room 125, State Capitol

Common Cause Minnesota will outline a major complaint that it has filed with the Campaign Finance Disclosure Board alleging that three different entities circumvented Minnesota disclosure law and failed to properly disclose large contributions.  The parties involved could face civil penalties totaling $5.1 million and criminal prosecution.

###

Whew!  Scary!

And when the CFB released its results, CCM spun it like it was huge news; Mike Dean, CCM’s president, tweeted:

Campaign Finance Board finds that Minnesota’s Future, LLC Violated State Law:

Of course, like everything Mike Dean and CCM say and do, it was a bunch of twaddle.   The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board released its conclusions.

Among CCM’s many charges was that the Republican Governors Association didn’t disclose its donors according to Minnesota law.

It was true; they did it better than Minnesota law!

The Board notes that the RGA disclosed all of its sources of income to the IRS under the requirements applicable to organizations registered under IRC section 527. The timing of that disclosure is different than what is required in Minnesota but the level of itemization is greater than Minnesota requires. This observation is noted because it suggests that avoidance of disclosure was not a motive for the RGA when it made its contribution to Minnesota Future, LLC.

Conclusions from CFB investigation – again, with emphasis added:

Based on the above analysis, and the submissions of the Complainant and the other parties, the Board makes the following:

Findings Concerning Probable Cause

1. There is probable cause to believe that Minnesota Future, LLC, and State Fund for Economic Growth, both Minnesota corporations, operated as political committees as defined by statute and were required to register with the Board within ten days of accepting contributions or making expenditures in excess of $100.

2. There is no probable cause to believe that the failure of Minnesota Future, LLC, or State Fund For Economic Growth to register was done with the knowledge and understanding the corporation was, in fact, required to register.

3. Minnesota Future, LLC, and State Fund for Economic Growth have registered with and reported to the Board retroactive to the date they first accepted contributions in excess of $100. They have completed their registration and reporting obligations. Consequently, there is no probable cause to believe that an ongoing violation exists.

So there was no substantial violation of any kind.  It was a technical violation of a provision in state election finance law that’s not all that clear; no harm was done, no fines were levied (they very frequently are in these cases); Minnesota Forward didn’t get so much as a stern “you watch what you’re doing, now!”  No “criminal charges”, no “multimillion dollar fines”.

Nothing.

CCM’s selective complaining was incongruous enough to make even liberal-in-good-standing Paul Demko ask:

But Common Cause did not file a similar complaint against WIN Minnesota, a DFL-aligned organization that has been helping pay for attack ads against GOP nominee Tom Emmer. The group received a similar $250,000 contribution from the Democratic Governors Association (DGA).

Dean said WIN Minnesota is in compliance with the law because it’s organized under a different section of the tax code and has a broader mandate then simply influencing electoral politics. But he conceded that WIN Minnesota is no more transparent in revealing the source of the DGA money then its conservative counterpart. “The issue is one organization followed the law and the other organization did not,” Dean said.

Except that MNForward did, according to the Campaign Finance Board – and if WIN Minnesota (one of the maze of shell groups underwrting “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”) did, it was only by the stretchiest definition of “the letter of the law”, and I doubt even that.

So you might be reading this, and thinking – “Wow – Common Cause sounds like  a bunch of weasels”.

Now, now.  Not yet, they don’t.

Read this bit first (again with emphasis added):

At issue is a $429,000 contribution that the Republican Governors Association funneled to the group, which has been running television commercials bashing DFL gubernatorial nominee Mark Dayton. Common Cause argues in the complaint that Minnesota’s Future was required to disclose the names of donors who contributed to the Republican Governors Association.

Leaving aside the fact that the Campaign Finance Board rejected the premise that Minnesota’s future did anything wrong, I’d like you to check this out.  It’s an excerpt from Page 4 of Common Cause’s 2008 IRS Form 990 – disclosures.

Can’t read the names?

Get used to it.  There are eight pages of donations, a total of 44 of them, totalling over $600,000.

For one year.

And not one name.

For a group that alleges itself to be all about “transparency in politics”.

The lesson from this?  Whenever “Common Cause” pops up in this state’s political discourse, they need to be pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage.  They exist only as a front group for the DFL; they are fundamentally dishonest.

I’ve invited CCM “president” Mike Dean to appear on the Northern Alliance Radio Network to discuss his various charges, and defend CCM against the charge that they are lying to the people.  Repeatedly.  For almost three months.

I expect better from responsible adults with non-risible points of view.

Place your bets.

We’ve been covering the Joel Rosenberg  case.  Joel carried a handgun and knife into Minneapolis Police Department’s headquarters, leading him into a rhubarb (here, here and here) with a Sergeant Bill Palmer.  A month after the rhubarb, Hennepin County issued an arrest warrant, and held him for a couple of days (Joel was bailed late last week).

Now, I’m no lawyer.  But Mark Bennett is – a criminal defense lawyer in Texas – and last week he had a pretty sanguine view of Rosenberg’s chances both against the charges and in his future lawsuit against Hennepin county.

Joe Doakes of Saint Paul is also an attorney.  And he takes a rather different view.

Joel Rosenberg is charged with violating Minn. Stat. 609.66, Subd1(g), possession of a dangerous weapon in a courthouse complex.  I think he’s in grave danger of being convicted.

“Dangerous weapon” is defined in Minn. Stat. 609.02, Subd. 6 to include guns, of course, but also includes “. . . any device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm . . . .”

Minn. Stat. 609.66, Subd. 1(g) (b) (2) provides an exception for persons carrying pistols pursuant to a valid permit, if that person gives notice to the Sheriff.  The method and timing of notice is not specified.   Joel claims he gave notice, the Complaint claims the Sheriff has no record of it.  This raises both a matter of legal interpretation (can you give notice once and it’s good forever, or must you give notice for each visit, and how far in advance) as well as a matter of proof (did he actually give the notice).

Rosenberg has pointed out that he has is notice on file.  Hopefully that won’t be an issue; I’m looking forward to seeing the county claiming that  you have to notify them before every visit…

Even assuming both go in Joel’s favor, the case is not ended.

A knife is capable of producing death.  A knife is a dangerous weapon within the meaning of Minn. Stat. 609.66.  If the office where the incident took place is part of a courthouse complex, then Joel’s gun may have been legal but his knife certainly was not.

Hm.

Of course, the big question has been “can a judge more or less arbitrarily call buildings “courthouses”…

Red: Henco Gov't Center - Green: City Hall, where Rosenberg was arrested.

…that, in fact, are not ?

“Courthouse complex” is not defined.  The statute does not specify who has authority to designate a building as being part of the “courthouse complex.”

Minnesota’s government is divided into three co-equal branches.  The legal doctrine of Separation of Powers means the Judicial Branch has exclusive authority over matters of judicial administration and judicial officers.  Lawyers, for example, are licensed not by the Executive Branch in the manner of electricians or land surveyors, but instead are licensed and disciplined by the Supreme Court.  Naturally, there is a great deal of overlap (for example, under Article VI, Section 5 of the Minnesota Constitution, judges’ salaries are set by the Legislature).  There is no clear line dividing the branches’ powers.

Minn. Stat. 484.77 provides the County Board must furnish suitable facilities for court purposes; thereafter, the County Board and the District Court must mutually agree upon relocation, renovation, etc.   To my knowledge, the Hennepin County Board has not designated any buildings to be part of a “courthouse complex.”

There is no specific statutory authority for judges to designate buildings as part of a “courthouse complex,” but because of the Separation of Powers doctrine, judges historically have had the power to maintain order in their own courts.  Bailiffs are Deputy Sheriffs (Executive Branch) but they are assigned to work under the control and direction of the court (Judicial Branch).

S0 – separation of powers is good.  So how about a branch of government using that separation to more-or-less arbitrarily decide which state law applies to them?

There is a standing Order designating the City Hall as being one of the “court facilities” for purposes of banning dangerous weapons. I assume “court facilities” is the functional equivalent of “courthouse complex.”  The Order was issued by Chief Judge James Swanson in 2008.  In my experience, it is unlikely for such an Order to be the work of one rogue judge; instead, all the judges on the Hennepin County bench likely agreed on the order and the Chief Judge signed it.

The Order states its authority to designate buildings as part of the court facilities for purposes of banning dangerous weapons is the inherent responsibility of the Judicial Branch to ensure order in the court.  Joel may argue that Judge Swanson lacked authority to issue the order because of Minn. Stat. 6624.714, Subd. 23, which provides: “No sheriff, police chief, governmental unit, government official, government employee, or other person or body acting under color of law or governmental authority may change, modify, or supplement these criteria or procedures, or limit the exercise of a permit to carry.”  But the named officers are Executive Branch officials.  Judges are conspicuously absent from the list perhaps because, under Separation of Powers, the Legislative Branch knew it lacked authority to tell the judicial branch how to run its shop.

When a statute is ambiguous, the courts look to the legislative history to determine the intent of the law.  The harm meant to be addressed by Subdivision 23 was the problem of local officials exercising discretion in issuance of carry permits and this subdivision cures that ill.  I don’t remember anybody testifying to the need to carry guns in courtrooms.  Reading this subdivision to limit the judicial branch’s inherent authority to maintain order in the courts is a stretch.

So is the Henco judge’s order “overly broad?”

Another possible argument is that the Order is overly broad because it lists entire buildings, not only those sections of the buildings used for courtroom purposes.  In contrast, the Ramsey County judges issued a similar order in May 2003 that limited the definition of “courthouse complex” to those areas of buildings where court activities took place, except where the layout of a building made that impossible (50 West Kellogg) in which case the entire building is designated.  Hennepin’s Order is not so narrowly tailored.

Over-breadth is a fact-specific analysis.  If it would be difficult or burdensome to reconfigure the building to segregate the courts portion from the rest of the users of the building, then designating the entire building as part of the “complex” probably would be found to be valid.  Certainly the local trial court judge will think so.  The Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court tend to defer to the trial court in matters of fact because the trial court had the best opportunity to assess the credibility of the witnesses and hear all the evidence.

And in places like Henco, if there’s one thing that’s more important than upholding state law, it’s never, ever offending the Chief Judge:

As a practical matter, no District Court judge is going to find that her own Chief Judge lacked authority to issue the Order or that it was over-broad.

Then, there’s the matter of the knife:

Assuming the trial judge finds the Chief Judge had authority to issue the Order designating the entire City Hall building as a courthouse, the statute prohibits knives as dangerous weapons.  Aside from Sgt. Bill Palmer’s word, is there any proof Joel had a knife?  Sadly, yes; Joel himself shot a video of it and posted it on YouTube.  But a YouTube video is not eyewitness testimony, it is hearsay; can that be used against him?  Sure, when Joel publicly posted the video and its taunting follow-up, he made an admission against interest, basically a voluntary confession, which is an exception to the hearsay rule.   It was an unforced error but it still goes against him.

If this goes to trial, Joel will be convicted and the conviction will be upheld on appeal.

Ouch.

More on this later today.

Now, Joel’s been on a mission for a while now.  Was there another way?

But he had no choice, right?  He had to carry the gun to bring a test case to have the Order thrown out, right?  What else could Joel have done to contest the overbreadth of the Order?

He could have filed an Application for the Writ of Prohibition under Rule 120 of the Minnesota Rules of Appellate Court Procedure.   That application asks the Court of Appeals to prohibit the Hennepin County court from enforcing its order.  The Court of Appeals then decides whether Judge Swenson had authority to issue the Order, and whether designating the entire building made the Order overly broad.  If Joel doesn’t like the Court of Appeals’ answer, he goes to the Supreme Court.  If he doesn’t like their answer, he goes to the Legislature for an amendment to the law.  But no matter how many times he loses in those places, he doesn’t go to jail.  The filing fee is $550, the attorneys will cost a couple of grand, he probably could get a group of people to join in the application (form a non-profit named “Citizens for Safer Courtrooms” and have it accept donations to fight the case).  That’s the proper way he should have proceeded.

Bear in mind, Joe is not a critic of Joel’s:

I like Joel.  He’s a great writer and a good teacher.  But this time, I think he’s stepped in it.  I suspect his preoccupation with his wife and daughter’s troubles prevented him from thinking the problem all the way through.

If he hadn’t brought the knife, if he hadn’t videotaped himself violating the Order, if he hadn’t published his confession on YouTube . . . maybe things would have worked out differently and I’d have been eager to stand behind him.  I’ve hit his Donate button on the Ellegon website out of respect for his past contributions to the carry movement, but I don’t think the carry community benefits from making his case a hill to die on.  I won’t be publicly supporting him.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

So to sum up – judges can walk all over the intent of state law because “separation of powers” allows them to.

Even if it means walking over it to attack people – carry permit holders – who are, statistically, two orders of magnitude less likely to commit crimes than the general public.  And I suspect that includes county judges.

More on this later this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Britney Spears is totally hotter than Christina Aguilera.

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

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

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

The old “take a theatrical look in the dictionary to set up today’s column”  trick is an old favorite for writers who’ve hit bottom in the idea bag but still need to crank something out. 

I am, of course, nowhere near the bottom of the barrel – and I’ve always found the whole “Hey, lookit what I pulled out of the dictionary!” thing to be a tiresome cliché. 

Still, I found myself drawn, mirabile dictu, to the dictionary this morning.  For some reason, I felt the need to look up “flack“.  ‘Strooth!  And here’s what it said:

flack    /flæk/  [flak]  

–noun Sometimes Disparaging .

1. press agent.

2. publicity.

–verb (used without object)

3. to serve as a press agent or publicist: to flack for a new rock group.

–verb (used with object)

4. to promote; publicize: to flack a new record.

Use flack in a Sentence

Origin:

1935–40; said to be after Gene Flack, a movie publicity agent

Utterly unrelated to my trip to the dictionary (pinky swear!), I read yesterday’s Lori Sturdevant column in the Strib.  No, I know – I constantly accuse Sturdevant of being, well, a flack for the DFL.  But there is, I swear to Jah Rastafari,  no connection.  Really!

Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s self-congratulatory performance Thursday in response to that day’s whale-of-a-deficit state budget forecast sent me to the dictionary [Oh, snap! – Ed.] to check the meaning of the word “chutzpah.”

“Supreme self-confidence: nerve, gall,” Merriam-Webster Online said.

If chutzpah isn’t a fitting label for the show in the governor’s reception room, it surely comes close. It also may be apt for the temperament required for a governor who has presided over eight years of persistent fiscal trouble to mount a bid for the presidency.

Poor Lori.  Tim Pawlenty, governor and in the front ranks of Sturdevant’s phalanx of betes noir of eight years, is moving on to bigger and better things – certainly a run at the Presidency, and most likely a really, really great career in some capacity or another no matter what happens, while the DFL is set to endure at least four years in the Legislative cold and with, frankly, the worst governor in Minnesota history (even before inauguration), as she wraps up her career in a dying industry.   Tha’ts gotta stink.

No other governor in Minnesota’s 152-year history has handed his successor a $6.2 billion deficit forecast along with the keys to the Capitol’s executive suite.

But to be fair to Governor Pawlenty (an idea that no doubt causes Ms. Sturdevant abdominal pain), no other governor in Minnesota history has had to face such a grossly, profligately irresponsible legislative majority.   The DFL majority this past four years has set the “standard” for rodentine cowardice and expedient buck-passing.

Best of all – Sturdevant admits it herself, later in the piece. 

But we’ll get to that.

But if Pawlenty has any remorse or regrets about passing that much trouble along to the next occupant, he didn’t display them. Instead, he boasted that he was ending his watch with the state “on the right track” and with “money in the bank.”

And so he should!  Minnesota has – despite the DFL majority’s best efforts – an unemployment rate two points below the national average.  He kept (to a gratifyingly great extent) his 2002 “no new taxes” promise, and held the line against a crushing DFL majority for the past four years. 

Though Thursday’s numbers foretold a worsening problem in 2012-13, Pawlenty pronounced it “very manageable.” He allowed that most of it would have vanished already if his old nemeses, the DFLers who controlled the 2009-10 Legislature, would have done his bidding.

And Pawlenty was absolutely right.

Had he been paired with a legislature that was focused on anything other than catastrophic spending as a matter of principle, we wouldn’t be in this jam. 

But this is the DFL – the party that believes your money belongs to the government first and foremost.

Even though the 2010 Legislature gave its blessing to virtually all of the spending cuts and shifts Pawlenty imposed unilaterally (and, it turned out, illegally) in 2009, it deviated from the governor’s script in one respect. The cuts were designed to boomerang back for reconsideration by a new governor and the 2011 Legislature. (Those crafty DFLers didn’t anticipate that in the 2011 Legislature, they would be in the minority.

Did you catch that?  Sturdevant is saying that the DFL engineered the “budget crisis” to try to embarass the GOP!  

The DFL – the Party of Fiscal Sabotage!  Lori Sturdevant says so!  And if there’s an official voice of the DFL, Sturdevant is it in all but official name.  

How very statesmanlike of the DFL!  Way to look out for the future of Minnesota!

  The answer is simple; the GOP majority should show the new “Governor” no mercy, and no quarter.   He and his constitutional officers are the last vestiges of a party that gambled with Minnesota’s fiscal well-being, and lost. If that’s what the DFL did – essentially set a fiscal IED to try to pad their own political nest – then they deserve a good crushing. 

Spanish has a good word for that; Degüello.  Applied rhetorically, of course.  I – insignificant schnook blogger that I am – certainly plan to practice it for the next four years.

Look it up in the dictionary yourself.  It’s your cliché, not mine.

Any time anyone tells you that a Harvard degree immunizes the bearer from complete idiocy, make them read this.

Yeah, it’s worse than this.

…the President assertions that:

1) The stimulus didn’t work because it wasn’t big enough

2) What we need is more spending

3) And higher taxes

Are

1) Wrong, 2) Wrong and 3) Wrong.

economic theory, history and statistical studies reveal that more taxes and spending are more likely to harm than help the economy. Those who demand spending control and oppose tax hikes hold the intellectual high ground.

Which tickles just a bit as surely President Obama has staked out the intellectual high ground, right?

Using powerful statistical methods to separate these effects in U.S. data, Andrew Mountford of the University of London and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago conclude that the small initial spending multiplier turns negative by the start of the second year.

Sound familiar?

government purchases have a GDP impact far smaller in New Keynesian than Old Keynesian models and quickly crowd out the private sector. They estimate the effect of the February 2009 stimulus at a puny 0.2% of GDP by now.

That’s two tenths of a percent.

By contrast, the last two major tax cuts—President Reagan’s in 1981-83 and President George W. Bush’s in 2003—boosted growth. They lowered marginal tax rates and were longer lasting…tax cuts have been far more likely to increase growth than has more spending.

Read it. It’s a bit technical, but it serves to reveal a President whose recently and soundly rejected policies are founded not in economic efficacy rather at best, in ignorance and at worst, and most likely, in an arrogant, transparent and desperate attempt to further his extreme liberal ideology.