As several state flirt with legalizing marijuana, it’s time for a quick pro-and-con check:

Legalization would be good because:

• The “war on drugs” has killed more people than Vietnam, and with less to show for it.
• The “war” has also destroyed most American inner cities.
• The black market has created a multinational organized crime network that Al Capone would envy, and whole soulless violence would make Sammy The Bull Gravano blanche in mute horror.
• Pot is probably less harmful, all in all, than booze.

Legalization would be bad because:

• Stoners are the most annoying people in the world.
• Stoner culture is the most annoying counterculture in the world.
• Phish and Dave Matthews.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Police investigating a “bias crime” against five churches in Buffalo:

Police believe the same person broke into St. Francis Xavier and destroyed a number of windows at the 7th Day Adventist Church. The other churches were plastered with signs making reference to Jesus being gay and other offensive comments.

“When we arrived on Sunday and saw this poster with a lot of inflammatory language about Jesus, we took it down and called the police,” Jarvis said.

Buffalo Police Chief Mitch Weintzel said the signs contained homosexual overtones and derogatory comments that any Christian person would find offensive as relating to Jesus.

Victims say it’s clear whoever left the signs was trying to send a message. Now, investigators are trying to find out what that message is.

The vandal(s) hit five churches in Buffalo:

• St. Francis Xavier
• Zion Lutheran
• 7th Day Adventist
• Buffalo Presbyterian
• Hosanna Lutheran

Surveillance footage shows a “person of interest”…

Courtesy Fox9 News

(churches have surveillance cameras?  Who knew?)

…and, I guess, a minivan of interest:

Courtesy Fox9 News

Back to the news report:

 So far, officials say there is no clear link between the vandalism and the controversial marriage amendment. The churches that were struck differ in their stances and there was no mention of voting on the signs.

“At first, I thought it might have because there was some homosexual language and overtones on the poster — but as I’ve been hearing a little bit more and talking with police about it, we’re doubting that might actually be the issue,” Jarvis said.

Any side bets on which Twin Cities leftyblog the vandal reads?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re an incident over the weekend – a former semi-pro defensive end tackled an armed robber outside a Superamerica in Rogers:

Store customer sees crime about to happen, takes prompt action to stop robbery and capture suspect while police officer stands around watching, gets snotty remark from Chief of Police.

Lucky he didn’t get arrested for interfering with the officer’s observations, I suppose. Still, it’s annoying. The Chief could have said “Hey, thanks for the assist, man, we’ll take it from here; but for all you folks listening, don’t try this at home . . . unless you’re as big as my friend, here [big grin and fake punch in the shoulder].” That would have been classy. Now, the Chief just looks prissy. Jerk.

On the one hand, I’m sure there’s a liability issue involved; some nutcase will no doubt sue a police chief that is seen to encourage “vigilantism”.

On the other? I’m a fire-breathing law-and-order libertarian/conservative -and I’m getting more than a little concerned about the quality of the relationship between the police and the people.

Normally, with stories like that of Duluth-area DFL state Rep. Kerry Gauthier – who was caught en flagrante Clinton with a 17 year old outside a Duluth rest stop a few weeks ago – I’d say “the double standards astounds me”; the media have been largely, er, keeping their hands off the story.

There’s a notable exception; the Duluth News-Trib is not amused at the extreme paucity of information from the cops in re this case, including information they are required by law to release:

As Stahl reports, the Minnesota State Patrol and Duluth police at first flat-out denied a request by the News Tribune for public information pertaining to the “suspicious activity” at the rest stop. They refused even though Minnesota law clearly requires certain information on calls made to the police for service be made public. That includes the date and time of a call, the agencies involved, the nature of the request for police, and witnesses to the incident. The Minnesota Government Data Practices Act also states that agencies should release “a brief factual reconstruction of events associated with” a police call.

After the News Tribune informed the agencies what records should be public under state law, some information was released. But only details on the time, date and place of the call were released. All the newspaper — and the public, by extension — was told with regard to the reason for the police response was “suspicious activity.” That’s hardly “a brief factual reconstruction.” The State Patrol and the city of Duluth then passed the buck to the other with regard to who should release such a reconstruction.

Minnesota mainstream media (the News-Trib excepted) observes double-standard favoring DFLers; dog sniffs dog.  As old as our 10,000 lakes.  Cops – who were happy to blather about, say, Rep. Hackbarth, down to their personal opinions, when no personal contact, much less crime, occurred – are keeping mum about a favored DFLer.

Nothing astounding.

What is astounding?  A 56 year old guy at a Swap Meat with a 17 year old apparently does not violate Minnesota’s statutory rape laws.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country!” – John F. Kennedy

“Thank Goddess – Adults having sex with 17 year olds is vaguely technically legal in Minnesota!” – every DFLer in Duluth.

I’m not going to get into the politics of the shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters.

Neither are the leftymedia.  In stark contrast to…

• the Aurora shooting, where NBC’s Brian Ross falsely identified shooter Holmes as a Tea Party organizer
• the Tucson massacre, where the blood hadn’t dried before the leftymedia gravely blamed it all on Sarah Palin’s rhetoric
• The Discovery Network incident, in which a nutcase with a gun and a bomb took over the network’s lobby.  It was blamed on conservatives, until it turned out James Jay Lee was a Zero Population Growth advocate inspired by Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holgren (at which point the story disappeared)
• the Pentagon Subway shooting, which the left and media (ptr) blamed on the Tea Party until it turned out John Patrick Bedell was a lefty (at which point the story disappeared)
• the Austin, TX airplane crash, in which a lone pilot crashed a light plane into the skyscraper housing the Austin, Texas IRS office.  Blamed, naturally, on the Tea Party, until it got out that Joseph Stack was an anti-Bush zealot (at which point the story disappeared)
• The death of Bill Sparkman, which the media hurried to pin on Michele Bachmann, until it turned out he was a lefty too (at which point the story disappeared)

…the media are being very circumspect about politicizing the incident.

Why, maybe they’ve learned their lesson!

Or maybe they are, as always, serving the narrative, if they bothered to note the incident at all.

It’s been in all the papers – there was another spree killing yesterday.  40-year-old Wade Michael Page killed six at a Sikh temple before a cop killed him.

My condolences and prayers, naturally, go out to the victims and their families, as well as those of the cop wounded in the exchange.  Many Sikhs came to America to escape this sort of thing; their sect has been the target of considerable violence from both Hindi and Muslim extremists in India.

Naturally, the left is already politicizing the hell out of this; it’s a crisis and so not to be wasted.  The waves of attacks on the law-abiding gun owner, the NRA, and by some accounts the biggest enemy of all, the Middle Aged White Guy, have already begun.

But all but the most over-the-edge lefties agree that there are some people who do get to have guns.  For most, the military is one of them. And Page  is a veteran, albeit not one that’s going to appear on any recruiting posters

CBS News reports that Page enlisted in the Army in April 1992 and was given a less-than-honorable discharge in October 1998. He was last stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., serving in the psychological operations unit.

Speaking of psychology:

The Southern Poverty Law Center told the Associated Press that Page was a musician in white power bands whose lyrics express hate against minorities and ethnic groups.

Mark Potok, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Monday that Page had been on the white power music scene for more than a decade in bands including Definite Hate and End Apathy.

Potok says the music is so violent and full of lyrics talking about carrying out genocide against the Jews and other minorities that the whole business exists almost exclusively over the Internet.

In the wake of the Aurora shootings, the boundlessly vapid Fareed Zakaria, on a segment on his CNN snoozer that was a thinly-veiled “Violence Policy Center” press release, “responded” perfunctorily to the idea that psychology is more a predictor of violence than is access to firearms, saying “you can have you opinion, but you can’t have your own facts”.  And that was all he said – as if invoking a cliche resolved the issue.

The fact is, legal access to guns is a dangerous thing, statistically speaking, only on conjunction with a few fairly identifiable factors; namely, if someone in contact with a legally-purchased firearm has…:

• a criminal record
• a drug or alcohol problem
• a dangerous mental illness

…violent crime will screech to a halt.

There are quite a few fake Minnesota IDs out there:

23,705 cases of possible fraud to be exact.

People like Pedro Chavez, aka Jose Cisneros, or Carlos Santiago, or Antonia Ledesma — four separate Minnesota driver’s licenses.

Detectives say the Albert Lea man was illegally collecting welfare for a decade, using real Minnesota driver’s licenses obtained with phony documents. He was convicted of forgery, and deported.

“Is it a fraudulent birth certificate, is it a fake DL from another state?” Neville said. “Yes in all those cases as well as taking someone else’s documentation and presenting it as their own.”

And who, pray tell,m is on the case? (Emphasis added):

 Of these 24,000 driver’s licenses, about 10,000 have been canceled. Beyond that, not much else has been done. Not a single name has been given yet to the Department of Human Services to check for welfare or food stamp fraud, and no names have been given or the Secretary of State to check against the voter rolls.

Make sure you brought quarters for the meter.  Mark Ritchie’s office is too busy editing the legislature’s copy.

Leave aside the obvious conspiracy theory – that Ritchie wants to debase the driver’s license as a standard for identification in the run-up to a probable victory for the Voter ID amendment; while the vast majority of the fake IDs were no doubt taken out in the interest of some sort of personal or financial fraud, you can bet that nine out of ten of the criminals who vote, vote DFL.

And that’s the last thing Mark Ritchie wants to upset.

Who knows how bad  episode would have been…

The armed gunman, 53, murdered a bailiff, 47, a locksmith, 33, and the prospective new tenant of the flat, 45, in the south-western city of Karlsruhe with shots to the head before taking his own life.

The bailiff had two bullets in his thigh before he was finished off.

The victims were tied up and ‘executed’, according to the local prosecutor. ‘This was a planned act and we are dealing with four cold blooded murders,’ he added.

…if Germany didn’t have gun laws every bit as draconian as violence -addled Chicago!

They said that if we voted for John McCain, we’d get secretive, imperial government that’d rule by decree and conceal its activities from the peasants.

And they were right! DEA Freedom of Information Act rejections have doubled since 2008:

Despite President Obama’s 2009 executive order requiring agencies to err on the side of disclosure when processing Freedom of Information Act requests, the Drug Enforcement Agency exempted a record number of FOIA requests in 2011 in nearly every category.

But it didn’t set records just in 2011: According to a comparison of publicly available data from FOIA.gov, the DEA rejected more FOIA requests in 2009, 2010, and 2011 than it did during the last year of George W. Bush’s administration.

It gets complicated.  I urge you to read the whole thing.

This one made the news over the weekend; in Phoenix, a 14 year old boy shot and gravely wounded an armed intruder who’d not only kicked down the door of his house while he was baby-sitting, but was pointing a gun at the kid:

The boy was home with his three siblings, ranging in age from 8 to 12, when he saw a woman they did not recognize at the front of the house around 4:30 p.m. She began pounding on the door, said James Holmes, a Phoenix police spokesman.

The boy went upstairs and got a handgun, police said. A man with a rifle had forced his way into the home. He aimed the gun at the boy, and the boy shot him, police said.

Having the coolness under fire to not only not have to stop to change his pants after what must be, to a kid, the most terrifying possible thing – a group of strangers kicking the door of your house in – and seeing a rifle being pointed at him, and returning fire with (by one report) a head shot?

Someone call the SEALS’ talent scout.

The boy and his three siblings left the house and went to a neighbor’s house, where the boy called police and his father, Holmes said.

“He took an action that no police officer, certainly no one in our community, wants a 14-year-old to have to take,” Holmes said. “And yet he’s safe, his siblings are safe, and so now we have to figure out why this happened and why these people were there.”

Another thug off the street.  That’s the good news.

Now for the (hypothetical) bad news:  in Minnesota, this kid’s problems, and his parents’, could be just beginning.

Arizona has strong “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle” laws.  If a shooting is ruled justifiable, the citizen is immunized from civil litigation over the shooting.

Here in Minnesota, even if the county attorney declines to press charges – and under Minnesota law, the boy would have to have proven he was an unwilling participant and that the force he used was appropriate and that his fear was reasonable, although clearly all three of those applied, and there is no “duty to retreat” in the home under Minnesota case law – the “victim” and his family could come after the teenager’s parents for damages for the injuries sustained.

A lawyer may well say “the suit won’t get far under those circumstances” – which is an explanation only a lawyer could buy.  The family will have to spend thousands of dollars defending against that non-lawsuit lawsuit – and that’s presuming they don’t run up against an activist judge, or a plaintiff with enough money or connections to land a big-dollar attorney with the aim of overwhelming them, or a crusading David “Darth” Lillehaug uber-attorney willing to fight against the family on a contingency just because he hates guns..

When lefties say “name one person in jail for lack of a stand your ground law”…:

a. We do, and

b. Jail isn’t the only hell that Minnesota’s legal system holds out for the families of the otherwise perfectly law-abiding citizen.   Eternal legal hell is another.

When our bored dilettante of a governor vetoed “Stand Your Ground”, all he did was give trial lawyers another marketing hook.

I’ve got nothing in particular against marijuana.  I’ve never smoked it, in part because I’m just not a “mellow” kinda guy – if I did a drug, it’d be cocaine, hands (and nose) down.

And I personally support legalizing pot.  Making this cheap commodity the focus of a federal prohibition has contributed to untold deaths and incredible misery in America’s inner cities. Decriminalizing pot would at least remove some of the expense and dislocation that our failed “war on drugs” has caused.

But with all that out of the way?  Stoners annoy me.  There is nothing in the world more annoying that numbed, hemp-reeking munchy-grubbing cackling drone of the Chiba Monkey set.   I’ll sit in a chair and listen to Shakira’s fingernails on a chalkboard all weekend before I listen to stoners babbling in Shaggy-Doo cant without forcing bongs down peoples’ throats.

So I’m glad to see that, along with Hollywood, government worker unions and plutocrats, America’s muzzy-headed hemp-clad frito-guzzling bong-o-nauts are among Obama’s big hopes in the coming election, as several state roll out pot legalization bills at least in part to try to turn out America’s Dave Matthews-listening, cheeto-searching, High Times-reading, neo-comatose Baked Caucus to vote for Obama.

Getting more young people to vote has long been a Democratic fantasy, since they tend to vote so heavily Democratic. But past attempts to bong the vote have been disappointing, in part because stoners aren’t the group anyone would most count on to bother filling out a ballot. Ahead of the 2010 midterms, The Wall Street Journal ran the story, “Democrats Look to Cultivate Pot Vote in 2012,” noting that California’s pot-legalizing Proposition 19 was being studied to see if similar measures “could energize young, liberal voters in swing states for the 2012 presidential election.” But exit polls that year showed no spike in young voter turnout, and marijuana legalization was the top issue for just 1 in 10 voters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

(Also carefully note, all you Paul supporters who think pot legalization is your path to the presidency)

We’ve been writing for years about Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom.

Mostly in the context of his pattern of lying about the law – in this case, about Stand Your Ground law proposals.  He’s repeatedly written op-eds about the law which completely misrepresent current and proposed law – making me wonder out loud how it is that a county attorney can be allowed to actively mislead the population about the law, like we’re a bunch of suspects under interrogation.

So with that context in mind, I suppose it’s good, if disturbing, to know that Backstrom does the same thing to other government employees.  Backstrom’s strong-arming of a Medical Examiner was behind the throwing out of the conviction of Nicole Beecroft, who was convicted of stabbing her baby to death in 2007.  I’ve added some emphasis:

However, medical examiners disagreed on whether the baby was already dead at the time of the stabbing. Beecroft’s attorneys struggled to convince the dissenting medical examiners to participate in the defense, in part because the medical examiners feared they would be fired, the Supreme Court found.

The Court’s opinion, written by Justice Paul Anderson, cited emails sent by Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom to Dakota County Medical Examiner Lindsey Thomas in which Backstrom argued that it would be a conflict of interest for Dakota County medical examiners to work with defense attorneys. “If you wish to be a defense expert, you should not be a public official representing Dakota County as our coroner,” Backstrom wrote in a Nov. 5, 2008 email.

And just like Stand Your Ground – Backstrom is either ignorant of the law, or counting on his subjects constituents co-workers being ignorant about it:

State law says medical examiners are independent and can testify for either the prosecution or the defense. Most of the state’s roughly two dozen forensic pathologists work for local counties. If medical examiners could not testify for the defense, the Supreme Court opinion noted, defendants would have to request expensive help from medical examiners in other states.

So think about this, voters of Dakota County.

You’re smart people.  You have a pretty successful county.

Can’t you do better than this?

Just saying, any of you attorneys out there who might be thinking about running against Backstrom next chance you get; let me know how I can help.

As most of you know, I oppose the death penalty.

And even that’s not quite right – I favor it for every reason but one – the inevitability that an innocent person will, between human imperfection, the politics of the prosecution system, bad defense, the emotions of death-penalty cases and just plain bad luck, be executed.

(And I was right about that).

But I’m writing today to say I’m willing to make an exception. Someone busted out Willy’s American Guitars in Saint Paul.

That’s like plundering the Vatican; like jacking up Graceland.

There is no punishment cruel or unusual enough for these people, when they’re caught.

One of the big lessons of this past month or so is that Stand Your Ground laws are racist and target people of color…

…oh, wait:

The NAACP.s Jacksonville chapter has thrown its support behind a woman who will be sentenced Monday in a shooting where she claimed self-defense against an abusive husband under the state.s Stand Your Ground law.

Marissa Danielle Alexander, 31, was charged with three counts of aggravated assault in August 2010 after she fired a single shot into the ceiling of her home during a dispute that somehow turned physical.

So – now the only reason to oppose stand your ground is that you’re racist and sexist?

Rock and roller, talk show host and Second Amendment activist Ted Nugent spoke out about the Martin / Zimmerman case yesterday on MSNBC’s “Hardball”.

The quotes were pretty damning: Nugent noted that the affidavit of probable cause was “so thin it’ll get thrown out by a judge”, and predicted Zimmerman’s acquittal.

God, Guns and Gibson made America great.

The Motor City Madman called the prosecutor’s announcement “a campaign speech”, and called the entire indictment “irresponsible and unethical”…

…oh, I can’t keep a straight face anymore.

It wasn’t Ted Nugent.   It was Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz.

Oh, everything else was real:

“Everything in the affidavit (of probable cause) is consistent with a claim of self-defense!”

We shall see.

…for the prosecutor in Florida to charge George Zimmerman with Second Degree Murder.

Corey also had a message for those who have been rushing to judgment on the case.

“You cannot know what it’s like to launch this type of investigation and come to this conclusion,” State Attorney Angela Corey said during the press conference.

“We don’t prosecute by public pressure or petition. We prosecute cases on the relevant facts of each case and on the laws of the state of Florida.”

The worst thing about how the left has treated this case – as a stage prop for Obama’s re-election campaign – is that it causes doubts in the justice system, among both those who are inclined to support it or not.

Naturally, the Obama administration and the media who push his narrative had every reason to portray the local prosecutors and police as racist peckerwoods who didn’t care that a black kid was dead.  And the claque that has been benefitting from that perception for decades now – Al Sharpton and the various race-war pimps – benefit handsomely from that perception.,

Which is, of course, not to say that the local cops and prosecutors did do a good job – in fact, we don’t know.  But prosecutor Corey is right – these ambiguous shooting cases frequently do take a long time to work out.  A great example – of both the time it takes to work out an ambiguous shooting and of a justice system horribly skewed by official tush-covering – is the Treptow case, from five years ago in Coon Rapids.

So there is much we don’t know about this case.

But one thing that any rational person – and by “rational person” I mean “one who rationally assesses the facts as they know them = does know is that this case is no indictment of “Stand Your Ground”.

Let’s compare and contrast the genesis (so far) of this case, and war-game out its resolution under Florida law (with its Stand Your Ground provisions) and Minnesota law (which still has a vague, ambiguous “duty to retreat”).

Assumptions:  We’ll assume that the episode went like this: Martin was walking (we won’t ascribe motives to him yet).  Zimmerman, being a diligent (maybe over-diligent) neighborhood watch guy, followed Martin in his car, then got out and confronted Martin.  The encounter went south – accounts vary – and either Zimmerman ended up attacking Martin, or Martin attacked Zimmerman (you can believe whichever you want, because only the jury’s perception really matters at this point).  At some point, and with whatever motive, Zimmerman shoots Martin, who dies.   The police arrive.  Zimmerman claims self-defense.

Under Current Minnesota Law, if the case were being tried under Minnesota law, the prosecution would have to prove to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman, while not planning to kill Martin, did in fact intentionally kill Martin without justification.  Zimmerman and his attorneys, claiming self-defense, would have to prove to the jury that…:

• Zimmerman reasonably feared death or great bodily harm – they’d have to convince the jury that Zimmerman’s fear of Martin beating him to death was reasonable.  Of course, people get beaten to death, strangled, clubbed to death with bottles all the time – there’ve been three “one-punch kills” in Minnesota so far in 2012.  I’m no lawyer, but I’m going to say this will likely mean having to prove that Martin really attacked him, injured him, and didn’t appear likely to stop at the time.   Is that enough to convince a jury?  We’ll see.
• He was a reluctant participant – No, the fact that he followed Martin, and disregarded the 911 operator’s instructions, don’t count.  Zimmerman had a right to be on the street, whether he was following Martin or not.  And 911 operators don’t give legal orders.  It might not look good for Zimmerman – but in fact he needs to prove that he didn’t willingly dive into the actual physical scuffle that led to the shooting.
• The force he used was reasonable  – in other words, he’d need to prove that the force he used was only enough to end the lethal threat.  If there’s evidence Zimmerman shot Martin while he was lying on the ground, then the case is over.
• He made a reasonable effort to disengage – If he convinces the jury that he was jumped and tackled before he had a chance to try to run away, or that he did in fact try to back away while under attack, then that’s what he’d have to do.  The prosecutor, of course, can try to convince the jury that Zimmerman should have tried to escape until he slipped into a coma with brain damage; an anti-gun judge could instruct the jury to keep to the strictest possible definition of “duty to retreat”.  Zimmerman, or any self-defense shooter under Minnesota law, could have been impeccable on the other three points, and still go to jail based purely on the discretion of the prosecutor, the prejudice of the judge, and the whim of the jury.  That’s why Minnesota needs a Stand Your Ground law.  But that’s a matter for the next legislature.

If Zimmerman failed to convince the jury that he’d met all four of those criteria, then his self-defense claim fails.

Under Current Florida Law – But the case is being tried in Florida.  Florida has a “Stand your Ground” law.  That means that the prosecutor must prove to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that:

• Zimmerman met all the elements of Second Degree Murder under Florida law – that he did in fact intentionally kill Martin without justification.
• Zimmerman did not reasonably fear death or great bodily harm – they’d have to convince the jury that Zimmerman’s fear of Martin beating him to death was unreasonable.  Of course, the defense will show the jury that people get beaten to death, strangled, clubbed to death with bottles all the time – I’m going to guess if there’ve been three  “one-punch kills” in Minnesota so far in 2012 that there’ve been more than that in Gainesville alone. The prosecutor, I’ll guess, will have to debunk the notion that Martin attacked Zimmerman, or build a case that Zimmerman really did attack Martin.  We’ll see.
• Zimmerman was not a reluctant participant – The fact that Zimmerman followed Martin, and disregarded the 911 operator’s instructions, may have been a bad idea – I know that after taking carry permit training twice, it’s the last thing I’d do.  But the defense will point out that Zimmerman had a right to be on the street, and convince the jury that he didn’t willingly dive into the actual physical scuffle that led to the shooting.
• The force he used was not reasonable  – in other words, the prosecutor will need to prove that the force Zimmerman used was beyond what was needed to end the threat.  If there’s evidence Zimmerman shot Martin while he was lying on the ground, then the case is over.  Othewise?  Not so much.
• He made a reasonable effort to disengage – Does not apply in “Stand your Ground” states.  Not so that people can “shoot first”, but because this is a provision that is abused by prosecutors; can anyone else see the absurdity of saying “yes, your life was being legitimately threatened – but you should have tried harder to run away before defending yourself?”

If the prosecution proves all the elements of second-degree murder, and disproves any of the three pillars of his self-defense claim, the jury will likely find ZImmerman guilty.  If the jury accepts all three of the pillars of Zimmerman’s claim (or reasonable doubts exist about them), then they will (assuming a rational jury) find him innocent.

The only difference is on whom the burden of proving the legitimacy of the self-defense claim rests.  That is all.

Sharpton and the race-war pimps will keep trying to fan this into a racial incident – because it benefits them to do so.  White liberals will try – and fail – to turn this into an indictment of “Stand your Ground” laws.

And before too long, the Obama administration will need to find itself another stage prop; the mainstream media, his Praetorian Guard, will dutifully move on, and the  case, provided you trust the local justice system, will reach the resolution it would have reached without all the national attention.

I don’t speed.

I mean, I set my cruise control at the speed limit (unless it’s icy or traction is otherwise bad, naturally), and keep it there.  I’ve never had a speeding ticket; I can figure many things I”d rather spend my money on.

So in a way,, the latest teapot-tempest exercising the Strib editorial board is only of intellectual interest to me; they’re  condemning the idea of allowing people with speeding tickets to pay a premium on their fine to keep their records clean:

Traffic tickets are supposed to serve as both punishment and deterrent for speeding motorists. Unfortunately, a growing number of those lead-foot drivers can buy their way out of trouble.

By paying extra, Minnesotans in some cities can keep speeding violations off of their driving records. Last year, more than 16,000 speeders took that route, according to data compiled for a March 25 Star Tribune story by Pam Louwagie and Glenn Howatt.

That number is alarming. Speed limits exist, not as suggestions, but for public safety.

And, let’s not forget, to try to enforce neighborhoods’ ideas of what life with cars should be like – I’m looking at you, Saint Paul – but that’s splitting hairs.

Here’s the part I thought was hilarious:

The legal system should also be fair in its application of the law. Minnesotans should bristle at any hint of a two-tiered justice system for speeders — one for people who can afford to pay more to make the violation go away, and another for those who can’t.

Now, that all sounds like common sense, doesn’t it?  Our justice system should only have one tier to it – right?

Of course, that’s BS.  The more serious the crime, the more two-tiered our justice system gets.  For anything where you’re getting into misdemeanors and some of the lesser property-crime felonies, among others, the tiers are sharply divided at the point where defendants can afford defense attorneys.  Below that threshold, they get squeezed into plea bargains that may or may not be a good idea (or even accurate – not a few defendants who are perfectly innocent but not wealthy get buried by well-funded county attorneys, and accept plea deals just to end the nightmare, or muddle through the best they can and occasionally get lucky.

But I’m getting ahead of myself just a tad.

Anyway – the Strib isn’t being especially daring in saying that there should just be one tier to our justice system.

Which is fine – except that whenever Mothers Against Drunk Driving wants to ratchet up penalties and wheedle down the limits for drunk driving, the Strib is right on board with the most two-tiered, wealth-friendly law in the land. If you set out to design a explicitly designed to skew the legal system against the poor, you could try to design a system more focused than Minnesota’s “implied consent” law…

….but you’d really be polishing a cannonball if you did.

Worse?  The Strib editorial board was right on board with the rest of the Minnesota DFL’s chanting points bots in trying to ascribe Tom Emmer’s legislation to reform the system as some sort of unseemly payback for his own careless driving arrests, rather than the bipartisan effort to redress this classist inequity that it actually was.

So, Strib – should our justice system always be one-tiered? Or only when a DFLer gets exercised about it?

It’s hard to keep track with you people.

Let me make a coupile of things crystal clear, lest the idiocracy that is the Twin Cities Sorosphere try to make hay by gang-raping the context of what I’m about to write:

• In a self-defense shooting, nobody wins. As you are repeatedly told in carry permit training, having to kill someone in justified self-defense is the second-worst possiible outcome.  While most defensive gun uses involve no shots being fired – like, about 98% of them – there are usually around 1,000 homicides in the US every year that are ruled justifiable.  Most of them leave behind a family mourning someone whose life took a tragic turn – and one shooter who has to live with one of the most terrible moral conundra known to man for the rest of their life.   And even when it’s as justifiable as can be – a 100 poiund woman killing a 250 pound stalker with a sexual predator record longer than the woman’s legs – it’s almost always a tragedy for someone, and almost always a psychologically, to say nothing of financially, scarring event for the person who did the shooting, no matter how justified it was.
• I’m a parent.  In particular, I’m a parent who’s had all sorts of trouble raising teenagers (although not nearly as much trouble as one particularly loathsome, depraved, morally retarded and, I think, disturbed leftyblogger would have people believe).  Whenever I hear of some teenager and their family coming to grief in some awful tragedy – a car crash, suicide, overdose, a prank, stunt or impulsive criminal act gone wrong, or whatever – think “there but for the grace of God went I and mine”.  Defusing IEDs is nothing compared to the impulses of a hormone-addled teenager under the best of circumstances.  If the circumstances aren’t “the best?”  Ugh.

With that said; did you hear that hissing sound?  That was the sound of a media/liberal narrative starting to go flat (with emphasis added on occasion):

With a single punch, Trayvon Martin decked the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who eventually shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old, then Trayvon climbed on top of George Zimmerman and slammed his head into the sidewalk, leaving him bloody and battered, law enforcement authorities have revealed to the Orlando Sentinel.

That is the account Zimmerman gave police, and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say. There have been no reports that a witness saw that initial punch Zimmerman told police about.

Bear in mind, this is Zimmerman’s account – as, apparently, corroborated by witnesses.  This is far from a final report from the investigators, much less any indication of what the county attorney, much less the Feds, will end up doing.

This is what the newspaper has learned about Zimmerman’s account to investigators:

He said he was on his way to the grocery store when he spotted Trayvon walking through his gated community.

Trayvon was visiting his father’s fiancée, who lived there. He had been suspended from school in Miami after being found with an empty marijuana baggie. Miami schools have a zero-tolerance policy for drug possession.

And so on, and so on.

This is no more final and definitive than the left’s hooting and hollering about “murder” and “stalking” and “profiling” were last week…

…except that this time it’s the police, rather than Media Matters (and you can expect a campaign to discredit the police department and prosecutors from the left’s chanting points bots next).

Two facts here:

First: under Florida law, Zimmerman is considered innocent until proven guilty:  since it’s a plausible (!) self-defense claim, it’s the police and prosecutors’ job to prove he wasn’t in legitimate fear of death or great bodily harm, that he used excessive force, and that he was a willing participant.  As a result, expect Media Matters and, eventually, the media to start second-guessing the whole Fifth Amendment thing when they really really really want to find someone guilty of something.

Second? The Administration has to be getting nervous.  As we discussed yesterday, the Administration needs this incident to keep their constituents – Afro-Americans and lily-white urban liberals – whipped up. But lynch mobs have short attention spans, especially if they can’t actually lynch anyone.

As I said when the shoe was on the other foot and the media was telling us in lock-step that Zimmerman was a cold-blooded murderer – we don’t know everything yet.

And by “we”, I mean “and that means you too, liberal know-it-all who believes anything the media has to say about anything”.

Sandra Fluke got laid off from her position as “Obama Administration Stage Prop”.

Trayvon Martin has the gig now.

I’ve been pondering why the Administration has been going so long on the Martin case.

Certainly the Obama administration has hated guns all along; the President tried use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to pin responsibility for Mexico’s ‘drug wars on the law-abiding American gun owner.  The fact that the media has been so utterly hands-off with “Fast and Furious” should show you just what an explosive scandal it should be; the Government trying to set up the majority of its own population?

Can you imagine what they’d have said if George W. Bush had used the FBI to set up a sting to try to blame 9/11 on Democrats, purely for political gain on a wedge issue?

So of course, Obama would like to find some way to take a chunk out of firearm rights, a movement that has spit in the eye of the left and (are you listening, MNGOP Legislative caucus) won, and won consistently for the past thirty years, by setting its bar high and not compromising on core principle

But gun control is only part of the story.

Here’s the real story: Afro-Americans are losing their enthusiasm for Obama.   Oh, not in a way that’ll lose him the black vote – but Obama’s initial election depended entirely on a whipped up base.  Obama is going to face an uphill fight getting his based whipped up, though; whatever “recovery” we’re in has largely skipped the black community; the black unemployment rate of 14% (actually up in the past month) only tells part of the story; while 59.6% of the general population is actually working, only 53% of the black working-age population has a job.

That’s catastrophic.  Not only has the black community not gotten any of the hopey-changey yet, it’s inescapable that if you’re black in America, you are worse off than you were four years ago.

Of course, a black kid getting killed is hardly news.  It’s sad but true; it happens all the time.  And the white liberal media could hardly care less; confronting the horrendous death and incarceration rate among black youth – to say nothing of black unemployment – would force them to confront liberalism’s failures, which means confronting its institutional racism.   So while the possibly unjust death of a young black man may be good for enthusiasm points, if it doesn’t get media coverage, it’s the proverbial tree falling alone in a forest.

But when you combine a dead black kid with an issue that does get the white liberal media exercised – their fear of citizens with guns?  You’ve got political gold.  Suddenly, you’ve got media coverage!

And that’s why Trayvon Martin is in the news, and Sandra Fluke is out.  Every dim-bulb that can be fooled into thinking “Republicans will ban contraception” has already been fooled.  Now it’s time to hoodwink the ones that think Republicans want to arm white people to kill black people.

And the media – wittingly or not – is totally on board with that.

To: News Department, KMSP-TV (“Fox Nine”)
From: Mitch Berg, very occasional viewer
Re:  A Warning

To whom it may concern,

I don’t watch a lot of TV news – but for whatever reason, I do wind up watching your morning news; it does carry a fair amount of local news, and yeah, I like Marler’s weather.  So sue me.

But I had your 9PM news on last  night.  I noticed that you had jumped on the national “Trayvon Martin” bandwagon with both feet.  That’s understandable – it bled, so it led.

I could go over some of the points of your coverage that were, er, squishy – but that’s really not why I’m writing.

I noticed that you were very prominently using Heather Martens as a source for your coverage.  Martens, you note, is the “Executive Director” of “Protect Minnesota”.  If you check a little bit, you might also find she may very well be the sole member of “Protect Minnesota”; if there are half a dozen members, you might want to try to vet them, because I’ll lay odds that most of them are ringers from the Second Amendment movement.   The late Joel Rosenberg used to tell stories of going to Heather Martens’ meetings and finding that every single person at the gathering other than Martens was a Second Amendment activist.    At any rate – it’s not a “group”; it’s a checkbook advocacy front.  It’s also the third name Martens has been through in the past ten years.  For most of the past decade, “they” were “Citizens For A “Safer” Minnesota”; before that, they were something like “Gun-Free Minnesota” or “Minnesota Without Guns” or something like that; I’ve forgotten, but let’s be honest, so have you.  They keep getting shredded in the marketplace of ideas;  they keep having to change their name.

Anyway, my point is this – if Heather Martens says it, it’s most likely wrong.  I was going to say “it’s most likely a lie”, and that is the truth, but I’m trying to be all calm and measured here.

No, seriously; have me on one of your debate segments – if she’ll agree to come on against me.  I’ve shredded everything she’s said and written for a decade now.  There is not even a faded patina of fact in a single utterance she makes.

Just saying – while there are lots of things to be written about the Trayvon Martin case, and even some about Minnesota’s proposed Stand Your Ground Bill (although most of your other sources on that subject are also lying hacks), Heather Martens is not the one you should be going to to find them.

Presuming, of course, “covering the news” is your goal, rather than “fluffing the narrative”.

I just thought you should know.

Have your people call my people – or the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, of course – if you ever want the whole story, complete with real facts.

That is all.

One dark, ambiguous evening, a black youth was shot under circumstances that, to the local media, were confusing. Not much information was available; the youth was shot by a citizen with a legal handgun.  The citizen claimed self-defense.

So the local media did what they always do on big stories – shootings! – when not much information is available, as they waited for the details of the investigation to go public.  They found stuff  to write about.

They interviewed the deceased’s mother and family – who, stricken with grief, demanded justice.  They talked with friends of the deceased, and community leaders, many of whom wondered why the law allowed mere citizens to use lethal force, or to be able to claim “self-defense” with such seeming impunity.

Some of the media’s learned observers scratched their furrowed brows and pondered aloud (or in print) whether the changes the legislature had made in 2005 to the state’s laws regarding self-defense were wise – repeating things many of them had written at the time.

I am of course, not talking about the Trayvon Martin case.  I’m talking the Evanovich case in Minneapolis last fall.  You had the family.  You had the friends and community leaders.  Furrowed learned brows?  Check .

You had everything you have today in the Martin case, with one exception; a resolution.  Media caterwauling notwithstanding, it was a legitimate enough case of self-defense to prompt the frothingly anti-gun, anti-Second-Amendment, anti-law-abiding-citizens-with-guns Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman to praise the shooter.

The point of this post is not to try to compare the Evanovich and  Martin cases; in terms of the factual and legal specifics, it’d be stupid to try, since we, the non-investigators, know nothing about the facts of the case.

Well, almost nothing; we know what the local Florida and national media have told us about the case.

And if there are any lessons from the Evanovich shooting to apply to the Martin case, they are…:

1. When it comes to emotionally-charged cases, the media is no better off at getting the facts than we are.  And that’s a best case.  Because…
2. …whether they will admit it or not, the media has a narrative; the higher up the media food chain you go, the worse it gets.  The law-abiding gun owner, the bitter, gun-clinging Jebus freak, is a powder keg just waiting to blow.  They’ve been saying it, one way or another – if not in their editorial stances, then via their editorial selection bias – since 1983, when Florida passed its “Shall Issue” law.  They did it with each of the 30+ states that have passed similar laws in the past 29 years.  They did it when Florida passed “Stand Your Ground” seven years ago, and in each of the dozens of states that have some combination of “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle” laws.   They’re still predicting it.  We’re still waiting for it to happen.  But hey, it’s only been almost thirty years; one of these days, the powder keg’s just gotta blow, right?

On gun issues even more than most others when it comes to the mainstream media; distrust, then verify.  Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.

That’s not to say the Martin case might very well not be a legitimate shooting.

We don’t know.

And when I say “we”, I mean “especially those of you who get your information on the case from the mainstream media”.

More later.

Since the Dems have their undies in a knot about “model legislation (when it comes from conservative think tanks, anyway), I think it’s time we mere citizens took our shot at the practice.

With that in mind, I’m going to submit a couple of model bills of my own.

———-

HF. No. 0001,  as introduced – 88th Legislative Session (2013-2014)   Posted on Mar 23, 2012

A bill for an act relating to public safety, specifying certain behaviors from legislators and appointed officials who referred to the “Stand Your Ground” act as a “Shoot First” bill.

Let’s be clear on two things:

1. Domestic abuse is bad.  Don’t abuse your significant other.  Physically, verbally, emotionally.  Just don’t.
2. If you are male in Minnesota (or, pretty much, anywhere), you need to get over the idea that you have any right to self-defense.  If a kerfuffle turns into a rhubarb and thence into scuffle, even if the woman clearly starts the fight, if the police are called and she has so much as a bruise on her wrists (from pummeling the male), and the male doesn’t have a meat cleaver stuck in his forehead, it’ll be he that goes to jail, and run into a domestic abuse charge in which he may not legally be “guilty until proven innocent”, but in which guilt is designed to be incredibly easy to prove, unless you are wealthy enough to afford quite the lawyer.  (Some of our more depraved leftybloggers, and at least one idiot state legislator, will no doubt copy this paragraph and tweet “Berg Supports Domestic Abuse!”.  Far from it.  Seriously, you’ve been warned).

Cook was jailed and charged with domestic assault by strangulation, which can carry a prison sentence of up to three years.

But in a phone call to a police detective 20 days after the incident, Baker recanted her claim about the choking. She said she started the fight and had beaned Cook from behind with one of her shoes, cutting him behind the left ear.

The slap that knocked her into the wall was a reflex to that, she claimed.

She also acknowledged punching him and pulling out three of the shoulder-length dreadlocks he wore at the time. (She later testified she kept one of the dreadlocks.)

She also told the detective that Cook’s slap had ruptured her left eardrum. With that information, prosecutors amended the criminal complaint to add a count of third-degree assault, which accused him of causing “substantial bodily harm” by breaking her eardrum.

The injury healed by itself.

Before the case went to trial, prosecutors offered Cook a chance to plead guilty to one of the felonies in return for a three-year probated sentence. He rejected the deal.

Baker maintained her recantation when prosecutors called her as a witness. She took the blame for the fight turning physical, saying she’d been drinking that evening, didn’t handle booze well and had made up the choking allegation because she was mad at Cook and wanted to see him jailed.

So that goes to show you – the domestic abuse system works!  Provided that you’re a millionaire who can afford a top-flight lawyer and the plaintiff actually admits to having lied about the whole thing.  Oh, and here’s hoping he can recover from ten games’ suspension to make the roster and keep your exceptionally-hard-to-achieve career.

All you guys living in trailer parks in Elko or duplexes in Minneapolis or ramblers in Hugo who might run afoul a similar situation?  Without the whole “top flight lawyer” bit?  No, no – it doesn’t work that way for you.