Attorney Remi Tunde
Principal Partner/Owner,
REMI TUNDE & Associates
plot 278 Emmanuel Avenue
Victory Island

Dear Friend,

In re: your email letter of November 22, you wrote:

“We are Attorneys, Solicitors and Advocates. We have been privileged to know Mrs. Jamila Ahmed and her predicaments. Having listened to her and her wishes, we are happy to be associated with the processes being taken to fulfill them.

Jamila has briefed us of your desire and intention to be part of the fulfillment of her dreams by agreeingto take delivery of the sum of $25,500,000.00 (twentyfive Million, five hundred thousand US Dollars only) and invest in humanitarian and charitable ventures.

Out of pure curiosity, does anyone actually fall for this anymore? Other than her, I mean? I’m just agog at the notion that not only do people fall for this, but other people on your end take it so very seriously:

The Secret Service claims that “in June of 1995, an American was murdered in Lagos, Nigeria, while pursuing a 419 scam, and numerous other foreign nationals have been reported as missing.”

Anyway – feel free to send me, via certified check, the sum of $10,000 – a pittance, really compared with the millions you and your client Ms. Ahmed need to smuggle out of wherever you are, that I may commence in my solicitude. You (obviously) have my contact information.

Remain blessed and best regards,

Yours faithfully,

 Mitch Berg

…before this happened.

How was it Carl Sagan described the US and USSR? “Two bald men in a room full of gasoline fighting over a comb with a blowtorch?”

That might have been it.

My daughter and I went to a “Level Three Sex Offender Community Notification Meeting” last week in the neighborhood. It was an educational experience.

While the thought that there’s a registered predator living in the neighborhood is disquieting, I was surprised – and put slightly more at ease – to learn that about 90% of Level Three offenders offend against either people they know (friends, co-workers) or their children. No, that’s not “good”, but offenses against complete strangers are rare.

Which isn’t to say I left the meeting feeling all warm and fuzzy. The offender – one of about ten in Saint Paul proper, and one of two in my neighborhood, although in a fairly far reach of the neighborhood – has been released from prison for the third time since doing his original bid for a sexual assault in 1997. He keeps getting tossed back…

…for failing to register.

The good news? The Saint Paul Police has a really good record at finding and re-arresting these people. The bad news? “Really Good” isn’t “Perfect”, and behind the “win/loss” stats, the “losses” sometimes add up to some pretty horrific crimes.

All by way of noting that USATODAY has noted the same phenomenon nationwide:

•Two-thirds of the states allow convicted sex offenders, including violent predators, to register as homeless or list a shelter or inexact location as long as they stay in touch with police.

•At least a dozen states list hundreds of sex offenders without specific addresses. California registered 2,716 as “transient.” Washington state listed 564 as homeless, but the number is probably much higher, says Carolyn Sanchez of the Washington State Patrol.

•Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maine and other states say the number of homeless sex offenders is rising. Landlords often won’t rent to them, and laws in dozens of states and hundreds of cities bar them from living near areas where kids play.

In fact, at least two of Saint Paul’s level three offenders live within two blocks of city playgrounds.

An exact count of convicted sex offenders who are homeless could not be done because not all state records are online. Some states do not list homeless as an address but allow shelters, post office boxes, highway mile markers and streets without house numbers.

In the 18 years since Jacob Wetterling’s kidnapping (a watershed event in this field, say the cops who spoke at the meeting last week), things have come a long way.

But I’m watching my street even more carefully these days.

There are some lessons to be learned in Henco Commissioner Mike Opat’s escape from a pair of carjacking scumbags:

Opat was about to get into his Jeep outside his home in Robbinsdale at about 10 p.m. Tuesday night when he saw the two strangers approaching in the dark, [Henco PR flak and one-time hottest woman in the Twin Cities Media Carolyn] Marinan said Wednesday night.

The commissioner nodded in friendly greeting, then turned to slip his Jeep key into the lock.

Within moments, he had been hit with the butt of a sawed-off shotgun, knocked down, kicked and punched. After he grabbed the gun and managed to break free of his assailants, Opat bolted from the alley, yelling for his neighbors’ help.

The robbers fled with his 1999 Jeep, as well as his wallet, cell phone and Blackberry.

Lessons for everyone; sometimes, resisting is your best option.

Kudos, Councilman Opat.

On the one hand, it’s good to hear that there was an arrest in last summer’s brutal murder of Mark Loesch, a Minneapolis father of four who was beaten to death on a late-night ride in South Minneapolis:

On Monday, Loesch’s father-in-law, David Barnes, was initially elated to hear that a 23-year-old man had been charged in the case, which appeared to have all the elements of a violent robbery.

But on the other – there’s a problem. Police allege that Loesch was procuring pot:

But when police officials publicly said they believe Loesch was in the area to buy marijuana, Barnes was brought to tears.

“I know Mark and don’t believe that is what happened,” he said. “They shouldn’t have slandered a dead person.”

I guess that’s one of the “High Risk Lifestyles” that RT Rybak was talking about.

After last fall’s incident involving middle school kids passing meth around in class, among other things,  this sordid incident almost seems like a return to a simpler, more innocent time:

Tipped off by some odd behavior during science class and a 15-year-old who had trouble negotiating a school stairway, St. Paul school officials discovered that four girls had shared a water bottle filled with vodka during their second-hour class Monday.

It almost seems like something Beaver Cleaver would do, in context.

Craig’s List has been the source of a few really bad dates and some really great deals on household stuff.

But naturally, there’s a dark side

Katherine Ann Olson had answered online ads for nanny jobs before without trouble. But one posted on the popular Craigslist.org website for a job in Savage may have cost the young woman her life.

Olson, 24, was found dead in the trunk of her car at a Burnsville park late Friday night. She was last seen by friends on Thursday morning, when she went to meet someone in Savage about the job, which authorities said she had found on Craigslist.

As a father of a daughter who’s a few years away from going out into the world, the story is both heartbreaking and alarmng.

This quote from Olson’s mother kills me:

“We grieve even more because of what the world has lost. Not just for us, but for all these other people she would have touched,” said Nancy Olson, her face still speckled with glitter from holding a Mother’s Day card Katherine made for her a few years ago.

“Parents get to raise a child and then release them to the world. And now she’s gone to the next world,” Nancy Olson said. “We’ve had her for the time we had her. And now we’ve given her away.”

It’s hard to really add anything.

A 19-year-old Savage [“]man[“] who police believe placed the ad is being held in the Scott County jail pending charges. Authorities did not release his name but said charges could be filed as soon as today.

While I still oppose the death penalty on principle, I will applaud the first yegg who jams a shiv into the guy’s chest if he’s found guilty.

A Robbinsdale Police Department officer is the protagonist in the Treptow case, which (as we’ve been noting without resolution since last June, was started when the officer allegedly kicked off a road rage incident that ended with Martin Treptow apparnently shooting him in self defense).

So I got a chuckle when Joel Rosenberg noted:

Believe it or not, the Robbinsdale PD has been participating in HEAT, the “Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic” program…

Submitted without comment.

One day, this woman will be considered a great pioneer; sort of like Rosa Parks or John Paul Jones:

She was fined and got a suspended jail sentence, but Mona Shaw says she has no regrets about using a hammer to vent her frustration at a cable company.

“I stand by my actions even more so after getting all these telephone calls and hearing other people’s complaints,” she told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.

Mrs. Shaw:  I’ll add my own.  Everything described below rings totally true to me and, I’ll wager, most Comcast customers:

Shaw, 75, and her husband, Don, say they had an appointment in August for a Comcast technician to come to their Bristow home to install the company’s heavily advertised Triple Play phone, Internet and cable service.

The Shaws say no one came all day, and the technician who showed up two days later left without finishing the setup. Two days after that, Comcast cut off all their service.

Once, during one of my experiments (the TV “broke” for the summer, in a successful effort to spur my kids to read more), I tried to turn off the Cable.  Not, mind you, my Comcast internet – a distinction about which I was painstakingly clear.  “We just need to put a filter on your line so that the internet will work without the cable”.  Whatever.
After waiting a week, a Comcast contractor showed up, fiddled with the box out back, and split.  The internet didn’t work. It took ten days for another contractor to show up – and he botched the job.  I called the company, and told yet another indifferent “customer account executive” that I’d prefer if they’d send actual Comcast techs this time.  It took Comcast another day or so to actually make everything work.

That, if you believe my friends who have Comcast, has been a fairly average timeline and number of visits.

Back to Ms. Shaw:

At the Comcast office in Manassas later that day, they waited for a manager for two hours before being told the manager had left for the day, the Shaws say.

Shaw, a churchgoing secretary of the local AARP branch, returned the next Monday – with a hammer.

“I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor … and I went to hit the telephone,” Shaw said. “I figured, ‘Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.”’

While I must on principle eschew this sort of violence and vandalism, and point out that the court system was right to impose consequences, I’ll bet the sentence was a lot lower than it might have been.

Because if there were even one Comcast customer on that jury, it might have been an acquittal.

All

Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, disputes Shaw’s version of its customer service record and calls Shaw’s hammer fit on Aug. 20 an “inappropriate situation.”

In absolute terms?  Of course.

In that discombobulated nether world of the Comcast customer?

Minneapolis cops find some unusual swag: 

Officers dispatched to recover an ATM machine found by a Housing Inspector during an inspection of a foreclosed home. Car 21 responded and processed the ATM which had been pried open.

Or maybe it’s teenagers.  Like mine. 

Joel Rosenberg with the latest on the Treptow case.

Whatever can be said about the Anoka County Attorney’s office — and I think, in this case, that’s rather a lot, and none of it terribly flattering — they’re certainly not engaging in a rush to judgment.  Tectonic plates move faster than Robert M.A. Johnson’s office has on this — and, unshockingly, they don’t have a reputation for slothlike slow-motion in other criminal cases.  Paul Young, the assistant county attorney assigned to make this — to prosecute this case, does not have a reputation for requiring time-lapse photography to see him move.

Other news?  Finally, after quite literally months of no contact with law enforcement — not so much as a single telephone call from Dave Westberg, the Coon Rapids detective who claimed to be intensively investigating this back in June, nor one from the Anoka County sheriff’s office, nor the Anoka County Attorney’s office — Rebecca and Martin Treptow have been informed that they’ll be called to testify in front of the Grand Jury.

Read the whole thing, natch.

MFB at Nihilist drew my attention to this bit here – about the Wisconsin (…) mom who got her kid high on chiba:

The criminal complaint says the three had agreed to keep the incident a secret, but police received a tip and obtained a court order to seize the video that includes images of the boy…

 Let’s stop here. 

Outrageous?  Absolutely.  These “parents” should be in huuuuge trouble.

But this bit here…:

… wearing a motorcycle helmet and staggering around a bathroom, “in what appears to be a confused and altered state.”

I wonder – has the writer actually had a two-year-old?

Because when mine were two years old, I thought they were high, half the time…

Alice Hausman is seen in district 66B in daylight.

And Nick Coleman writes a good column.

No, I’m being catty.  Every year, Nick Coleman – this blog’s guest of fisking honor, a person against whom I’ve pulled very few punches – writes one or two columns that make you sit back and go “this is what a metro columnist should be doing”.

And it is:

“It seems crazy,” she says, looking up at her paint job. “We don’t just have to fight drug dealers and gangbangers. We have to fight the city, too.”

Damn.  It’s a quote I’d love to have found.  It’s at the end of today’s bit, about a retired, MS-riven woman in a crime-sodden, lethal neighborhood in North Minneapolis who  is being fined into poverty by a city that can’t and won’t deal with  the crime that has destroyed the neighborhood that her family has lived in since 1941.

Slyter, 57, owns a home in the Hawthorne neighborhood of north Minneapolis. She has been a bulwark of decency as the block she lives on has been invaded by hoodlums and drug dealers. But in the eyes of the city, there is a bigger problem than criminals: Peeling paint.

Slyter was slapped with a $200 fine in July (it has doubled to $400) because her house trim needed painting, and she wasn’t able to reach to the peak of her roof, where the trim is 25 feet above street level. Get a ladder or hire a professional painter, a city inspector told her. But a ladder is a tough climb for a woman in a leg brace, and a professional painter is expensive and hard to come by in a neighborhood where workers can get shot.

Slyter’s peeling trim was going nuclear: Unless she got it painted, city fines could escalate quickly to $2,000 or more.

“They could fine me out of my home,” she says. “They just keep doubling until the fine is more than the house is worth.”

Of course, this ties into a bigger problem, one that is crying for some investigation – Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s imperious, gratingly arrogant-yet-comically ineffective code enforcement departments.  (Although someone is trying).

So this week, Slyter climbed atop a scaffold she built in the back of her pickup truck. With the aid of a 15-foot painting pole, she stood on tiptoes to paint the chocolate-brown trim and get the city off her back.

Her home, built in 1887, has been in Slyter’s family since 1941.

Context?

Slyter has tried to be a good citizen while the neighborhood has suffered through waves of criminal activity.

“Drug dealing, robberies, shootings,” Slyter says, reciting a litany of troubles. “Any direction you go within three blocks, you can point to a murder that has happened. If you want to live here, you have to turn your home into a fortress.”

Slyter built a fence to secure her back yard, and nailed planks across her storm windows to keep them from being pried open by burglars. These are not crazy measures in a part of the city where law-abiding residents cover windows with shatter-proof plastic and valuable belongings are chained to garage ceiling beams.

“We’ve all had to build fortresses,” says Joan Thom, chair of the neighborhood safety committee. “It’s not the cops’ fault. We love our cops. But when they arrest dealers, the judges let ’em loose and say they don’t have enough courtrooms to deal with every drug dealer. Then they haul people into court for stupid stuff like this. Hello!?! Which part of this picture are you missing?”

But at least the boat has perfectly-ordered deck chairs.

Question:  Does Minneapolis code enforcement go after homes stuffed full of gang-banging thugs?

I’m going to take a step back for a moment.  Yes, it’s important to keep neighborhoods up.  The “Broken Windows” policies of Rudy Giuliani in NYC and Brett Schundler in Jersey City were part of the plan that brought both cities back from decades of blight and – when combined with aggressive (some might say heavy-handed) police response – crime.

Minneapolis has got half the formula down:

If you are thinking it doesn’t make sense to police the paint while criminals control the corners, well, it doesn’t have to make sense: It’s city policy.

The inspections department is much more aggressive, says director Henry Reimer, especially in north Minneapolis.

The city issued 80,000 citations last year, ordering owners to cut grass, paint trim or make other repairs. Peeling paint might seem trivial, Reimer said, but city codes keep bad blocks from getting worse.

If you are a Minneapolis Republican…no, strike that.  If you live in Minneapolis and care about the future of your city, you should print out this next paragraph, quoting bureaucrat Reimer (emphasis added):

“People who maintain their property in disrepair help bring forth an environment in which crime is welcome,” he said. “We’re trying to move things in the right direction in terms of fighting crime. If you own property you don’t feel safe keeping compliant [with housing codes], then you shouldn’t own that property. Or you should pay someone to fix it who isn’t afraid.”

In other words, according to city bureaucrat Reimer, if you are afraid (of criminals the city can’t and won’t deal with), you are the villain.  You should leave.  Mr. Reimer:  Whose city is this?  The gang-bangers?  The Code Enforcement department’s?
If the Minneapolis GOP doesn’t have this quote in every mailbox in the city during the next mayoral election, they should disband.

Coleman even gets it:

But it isn’t that easy.

For the past 18 months, drug dealing was going on next door to Slyter. It was only when a recent police raid put an end to it that Slyter felt safe to do outside chores.

“I wouldn’t be out here in my yard if they were still next door,” Slyter said, nodding at the empty drug house where a pile of dirty mattresses sits on the curb. Even now, she says, she only does yard work before noon.

Why? “The gangbangers don’t get up until noon,” she says.

I can see R.T. Rybak’s next statement: “most of the victims are people who are out between 12PM and 5AM…”

Reimer says he respects Slyter’s concerns, but fear does not excuse homeowners from keeping up their property.

“We’re working holistically to address crime issues and take back our city,” he says.

It sounds good. In theory.

Barely.

With rights come responsibilities.  There’s a term for responsibilities without rights – in this case, the right to see your local drug-dealing gang-banger being tasered into incontinence and thrown into the back of a squad car, and then sent off to jail for a very long time.

Oppression.

But when you see a retired woman on a truck trying to reach the top of her house with a paint brush in a neighborhood where drugs are being sold on the corner, something is out of whack. Slyter isn’t the person who most needs cracking down upon.

Still, with luck, her house trim may now meet city approval.

Too bad the people of Minnesota can’t do the same thing to Minneapolis; walk in, declare the place out of code (“out of control gangs, catch ‘n release justice system, city government more concerned with citizen compliance than with fighting crime, largely for political reasons”) and start turning the screws through fines and harassment, ending in eviction.

Oh, wait – we can.  Every four years.

Will the people of Minneapolis be smart enough?

Bear in mind, most of what I know about the law, I learned from watching Law and Order. 

Which I freely admit isn’t a whole lot.  But, in at least one key respect, there’s a lesson or two in there that some parts of the American legal and law-enforcement systems could stand to assimilate.  In L’nO, often as not, thinking you’ve solved the case too early – based on “norms”/cliches, usually – is a “gotcha” that leads to mild, amused chagrin around the bottom of the hour. 

In real life, of course, it destroys lives, literally and figuratively.  It’s been in the news twice this past weekend.

Duke University finally apologized to the three lacrosse players in whose railroading they participated last year.  (No matter – everyone knew they were guilty, until, oops, they weren’t:

Duke University President Richard Brodhead apologized Saturday for not better supporting the men’s lacrosse team and their families after three players were falsely accused in last year’s highly publicized rape scandal.

Brodhead, speaking at the university’s law school, said he regretted Duke’s “failure to reach out” in a “time of extraordinary peril” after a woman accused three players of raping her at a March 2006 party thrown by the team.

“Given the complexities of this case, getting the communication right would never have been easy,” Brodhead said. “But the fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they were most in need of support. This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it and I apologize for it.”

Brodhead spoke at a school-sponsored forum on legal and ethical issues common to high-profile cases, and he received a standing ovation following his speech. He left afterward and school officials said he would not be available for further comment.

Well, after all, they were upper-middle-class white guys (mostly), and one had a record of being a jag.  That whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing doesn’t count for them, right?

And if that white guy looks like of like a redneck, well…:

A woman who spent more than a week trapped in the wreckage of her sport-utility vehicle has been upgraded to serious condition, a spokeswoman at Harborview Medical Center said Sunday…Her husband, Tom Rider, said Friday he was frustrated by the red tape he had to fight to get authorities to launch a search for his wife more than a week after she disappeared…When he couldn’t reach his wife, Rider said he called Bellevue police to report his wife missing.

Bellevue police took the report right away, but when they found video of Tanya Rider getting into her car after work, they told her husband the case was out of their jurisdiction and he should notify King County, he said.

Tom Rider said he tried that, but “the first operator I talked to on the first day I tried to report it flat denied to start a missing persons report because she didn’t meet the criteria,” he said…Thursday morning, detectives asked him to come in to sign for a search of phone records. They also asked him to take a polygraph test.

“By the time he was done explaining the polygraph test to me, the detective burst into the room with a cell phone map that had a circle on it,” Tom Rider said Friday. He said the detective started explaining the blip they had found and within minutes, news arrived that Tanya Rider had been found.

That’s right – shake down the husband before you look for the cell phone.  Because of course  the husband did it. 

The white guy always does it, doesn’t he?

Minneapolis’ 35th murder victim of this year so far was a guy not a lot different than me.  40something, kids, worked in the software racket, liked biking.  Mark Loesch even lived in my old neighborhood, just a few blocks from where I lived way back when. 

He was apparently beaten to death while out on a bike ride late last Friday night.

A local blogger and friend of Loesch’s remembers the victim:

I met him 12 years ago at an insurance company; I was a contractor, he was an employee. A manager casually mentioned to me that “this guy Mark really likes music, like you. You should go say hi”. So I dropped by, and we hit it off immediately: the awesome production skills of Trevor Horn was our first conversation.

We were work pals for a while, but worked on very different projects, and then he went off to something new. A few months later, he called me up with a fascinating new opportunity: He was part of a team moving a Prescription Benefits company from Detroit to the Twin Cities, and they needed to build a team FAST: Did I want to help?

So I joined him, and we worked very closely, at which point he invited me over for a party… so Pamela and I showed up. One week early! But he invited us in, and we had a great time for hours… maybe more fun than the “real party”… at least I remember our pre-party more. We carpooled for a year, and grew very close. He notoriously mixed me the “killer” eighth martini at my 30th birthday bash. I of course blamed it on him making it with Gin… not the obvious issue of it being the EIGHTH.

With all the carnage in Minneapolis, it’s important to remember that there’s a story behind every death.  Not all of them are as sympathic, on the surface, as Mr. Loesch’s, but behind even the most hardened banger or the most far-gone junkie there’s a father, a little sister or someone who loses a huge chunk of themselves.

Par Ridder gets his comeuppance:

Judge David C. Higgs, in a ruling marked by pointed criticisms of Ridder’s behavior, said Ridder violated the state’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act, and his “common law duty of confidentiality.”

“Given Ridder’s past conduct and his cavalier attitude toward his use and disclosure of confidential Pioneer Press information, it seems to the court that his past actual misappropriation is a good indicator of possible future misappropriation or use of confidential Pioneer Press information,” Higgs ruled.

It just goes to show you; no matter how gratingly smug an establishment media liberal you are, if you commit a grievous enough breach of conduct, a Minnesota judge might eventually hand you a nearly-meaningless consequence:

The ruling bars Ridder from his office for one year starting today, a move that lawyers for the Pioneer Press had argued was necessary to prevent further damage to their business. Ridder left the Star Tribune at 8:40 a.m., according to Star Tribune spokesman Ben Taylor.

I guess he’ll have to double-dog promise not to work from home.

Getting sent home; I bet Ridder hasn’t heard that one since fourth grade.

So as you’ve heard, there was a rape in Saint Paul last week.  It was a brutal assault – and, worst of all, a bunch of neighbors saw the attack, and did nothing about it. 

I’m involved in an email discussion group for Saint Paul politics.  And here’s a sampling of the conversation.  Our first subject – a prominent Saint Paul DFL fixer:

It is sad that so many people have become motivated by only two things
  greed and fear.  But, then when that is all they get from talk radio what
  does one expect?  Over and over again people are bombarded with how much  they  have to fear and that someone is out to take their stuff away from  them.   Protect what is yours don’t worry about the other guy.  It is  the poor’s fault  that they are poor.  If a child can’t succeed in school  its is fault.  Its  them liberals that want to steal my money… If a woman  was raped its her
fault.  Heck, she’s out there in the hallway with him,  making noise in my
building… just like Bill O’ says.

I usually pull back when I hear the likes of Michael Savage call liberalism a “mental disorder” – but I have to wonder about some of these people. 

So Bill O’Reilly – assuming he really says anything the author accuses him of – speaks for all conservatives?  Even all conservatives in talk radio?

Where does that come from?

And I’d be interested in seeing what’d happen if anyone were dumb enough to try to rape someone in an apartment building in, say, Lusk Wyoming?

…in just about forever

In the past, I’ve been open about the fact that I support the death penalty for every reason but one; the likelihood – indeed, the inevitability of eventually executing an innocent person.  When there is any conceivable doubt – and the fact that 200 people have been exonorated from death row in the past 31 years means that doubt is very conceivable – the fact that life in a supermax is every bit as secure as death and is reversable makes it much more acceptable.

But for all of that, I say this to you today; when they finally stomp John Evander Couey from the face of this earth for burying Jessica Lunsford alive, I will throw a party at my house.

Just saying that I’ll put my quibbles about capital punishment aside, now that Couey’s been sentenced to death.

Mark Steyn on the casualties of “tolerance” in Newark:

America has a high murder rate: Murdering people is definitely one of the jobs Americans can do. But that’s what ties young Malvo to Jose Carranza: He’s just another killer let loose in this country to kill Americans by the bureaucracy’s boundless sensitivity toward the “undocumented.” Will the Newark murders change anything? Will there be an Ioefemi Hightower Act of Congress like the Matthew Shepard Act passed by the House of Representatives? No. Three thousand people died Sept. 11, 2001, in an act of murder facilitated by the illegal-immigration support structures in this country, and, if that didn’t rouse Americans to action, another trio of victims seems unlikely to tip the scales. As Michelle Malkin documented in her book “Invasion,” four of the killers boarded the plane with photo ID obtained through the “undocumented worker” network at the 7-Eleven in Falls Church, Va. That’s to say, officialdom’s tolerance of the illegal immigration shadow-state enabled 9/11. And what did we do? Not only did we not shut it down, we enshrined the shadow-state’s charade as part of the new tough post-slaughter security procedures.

I have flown exactly once since 9/11 – and the security struck me, the rankest of amateurs, as pretty useless:

Go take a flight from Newark Airport. The TSA guy will ask for your driver’s license, glance at the name and picture, and hand it back to you. Feel safer? The terrorists could pass that test, and the morning of 9/11 they did: 19 foreign “visitors” had, between them, 63 valid U.S. driver’s licenses. Did government agencies then make it harder to obtain lawful photo ID? No. Since 9/11, the likes of Maryland and New Mexico have joined those states that issue legal driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

As always with Steyn – read the whole thing.

Margaret Martin, over at Minneapolis Crime Watch, notes the ongoing furor over in Minnesota’s most dangerous city about Mayor Rybak’s failure to hire more police officers.

Last week, it was the police federation – granted, hardly an action against their own interests, but still.

And now, the most unlikely union of all (I add emphasis):

Today another challenge was issued to the Mayor. This time in a joint press release from the Independence Party and Republican Party of the 5th Congressional District. The chairs of both organizations attended a meeting last night where police coverage was a key topic of discussion.

The release takes Mayor Rybak to task for not living up to one of his campaign promises and for not putting a priority on public safety.

We support the police federation in their campaign to bring more cops to Minneapolis . We believe that the mayor’s first priority should be to keep the promise he made one year ago. The city’s police department should be restored to 893 sworn officers, the number of officers that existed just four years ago, before the city’s drastic cuts to police department staffing. Even though the mayor promised to restore the department to 893 officers, and the city council budgeted the funds to achieve that commitment, we now stand 50 officers short of the goal. By year end, with no plans to hire additional officers, the department is likely to be at least 65 officers short of the goal.

It appears from the release that the mayor once again leaned heavily on the “but they cut LGA” crutch. This is a cop out (no pun intended) by the mayor. True, LGA was cut in 2003, but there have not been cuts since. The truth is that the mayor and the city council have deemed public safety a lower priority than other budget items, or they could have simply shifted funds from those projects into public safety. On top of that, LGA is well above earlier years which had greater coverage and the police budget was a higher percentage of the overall city budget.

Read the whole thing.

When the MNGOP and the “Independence Party” (think “DFL Lite”) team up on a DFL mayor, you know things are getting hairy.

In one of the funniest recent episodes of South Park, Stan’s little brother Ike’s kindergarten teacher seduces the toddler, gets caught, and, in a press conference before the trial, declares to be sorry, and that “…I am an alcoholic”. 

The crowd of reporters, cops and specators nod their heads, and eventually cheer the woman as she goes to rehab. 

It was funny (in South Park’s sick little way) – and pretty dead-on. 

As it were. 

But we’ll get back to that.

———-

Domestic abuse, of course, is no joke.  People get killed.  Although research shows that men and women are about equally likely to initiate domestic violence, women are more-usually injured or killed in these incidents.  Nobody is denying that. 

And it’s galling to have to make sure I’m understood on that point, since if I don’t some moron will pipe up “ah, so you condone domestic violence”.  Far from it.  But pointing out, for example, that women commit any violence, much less initiate their fair share of it, inflames some of this issue’s dogmatists.  And when  you start trying to address some of the problems in the system itself, some of them get downright apoplectic.

Those problems are pretty serious, though:

• In Minnesota, much of the funding to deal with domestic abuse is allocated according to the “Battered Womens’ Act”, a piece of legislation that, in effect, legally ignores abuse of men, and covers its eyes and plugs its ears and screams “nya nya nya I can’t hear you” when one tries (legally) to address the issue. 
• Some studies estimate that as many as half of domestic abuse allegations are brought immediately before and during divorce proceedings, and that as many as half of those are fake; charging domestic abuse is the “Nuclear Option” in custody battles; the allegation alone is frequently an insurmountable trump card.

Abuse is wrong.  And so is abuse of abuse.

———-

The issue became front-page news last fall…

…well, no.  “The issue” barely made a dent in last fall’s Strib pre-election hatchet job on Alan Fine. The Strib reported that Fine, who was running against DFLer Keith Ellison for the Fifth District congressional seat, had been arrested for domestic abuse in 1994.  The report ran at the top of Page A-1, naturally.  When Scott Johnson at Powerline brought up that there was never any physical evidence against Fine, and that he’d been released, never charged, and that eventually Fine’s ex-wife lost custody of their son to Fine – for domestic abuse! – the Strib carried Fine’s response.  On Page B7.

The Strib, acting as an organ of Keith Ellison’s campaign, used society’s partly-justified myopia about domestic abuse to put ill-informed votes in Keith Ellison’s column – votes that, in the long run, he scarcely needed, but wrong is wrong.

———-

All of that is a lot of background to a really sad, pathetic story; that of Mary Winkler, who was released from jail after serving a little over two months, after being convicted of shooting her husband in the back with a 12 gauge shotgun as he lay in bed.

Her defense?  Abuse, of course.

She then packed her three young daughters, ages 8, 6 and 1, in the family car and drove to Alabama, where she was taken into custody the following day.

During her trial in April, she claimed that she had been abused by her husband, with whom she had appeared to have an ideal marriage. She claimed not to remember getting the shotgun from a closet in their bedroom nor discharging it.

Winkler said that her husband, mortally wounded, rolled off the bed and asked her, “Why?” She said she told him she was sorry.

She was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder, but on April 19, after eight hours of deliberation, the jury found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter. On June 8, she was sentenced to 210 days in prison, with credit given for 143 days she had spent in jail the previous year before making bail. The judge allowed her to spend 60 of the remaining 67 days of her sentence in a mental health facility.

She was not, of course, a person with a long record of being abused.  Indeed, there was no record at all.  Not one domestic abuse call to their house.  Not one shred of physical evidence; not a single bruise, not a single scratch that Mrs. Winkler herself even saw fit to put on the record with a visit to a single doctor. 

Matthew Winkler was a minister at the Fourth Street Church of Christ, a denomination that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible, including Saint Paul’s teaching that women should be submissive to their husbands.

Mary Winkler’s attorneys claimed that she was beaten by her husband. She said at her trial that he made her watch pornographic videos and wear “slutty” outfits for sex. She said he was controlling and criticized her constantly.

Leave aside the alleged beatings – of which there was apparently no evidence, physical or documentary, whatsoever – for a moment.  All Mrs. Winkler’s other allegations are grounds for, perhaps, examining one’s theology, having a long talk with hubby about one’s bedroom practices, and calling a family therapist or a divorce lawyer. 

Not 12-gauge justice.

Let’s re-iterate; at no time did Mrs. Winkler introduce any evidence that she was “abused” in any sense that’d be recognized, at all, by women and men who do get beaten, punched, stabbed, slapped, burned and kicked every day in this country. She would seem to have introduced no evidence that would have convicted her late husband of any form of domestic battery, were he alive to participate.

None.

No, she introduced a pair of high heels – PG-13-rated strappy “FM” shoes that wouldn’t draw a second glance at all-ages night at any Twin Cities nightclub as evidence of the late Reverend Winkler’s untrammeled perversion. 

The defense responded:

At the time of the killing, the couple had been having arguments about their finances. Prosecutors introduced evidence that Mary Winkler had gotten involved in an online Nigerian check-kiting fraud and had written checks for thousands of dollars. That, the prosecution argued, was the real source of the friction in the marriage.

We’ll probably never know, of course, the real truth of what happened in the Winkler marriage (other than “nothing that Mrs. Winkler managed to bring to any official attention, in a society that meets abused women much, much more than halfway, and that is indeed biased, perhaps justifiably so, toward excessive caution in matters of domestic violence”).   We’ll never know, it’s likely, whether Mr. Winkler did anything that, in a rational universe, would justify having his insides turned to Innard Hash with a 12-gauge blast through the back as he slept (and please bear in mind that I am an advocate for the rights of genuinely-abused people to resist violence with lethal force, and for giving them the means to do so via the Minnesota Personal Protection Act), or whether he was a “controlling” jerk with some “quirks” who was too horny and “kinky” for his wife’s tastes.  It merely seems that the only evidence introduced at trial pointed toward the latter.

Apparently those are now capital crimes in Tennessee.  If you’re a husband, anyway.

Abuse – the real thing, genuine violence – is absolutely wrong.  And this ruling cheapens and devalues the meaning of the term for all the people out there who are suffering from the real thing, day in and day out, no matter what the Winkler’s situation was.

I’ll pray for the daughters.  Especially if their mother ends up getting custody. 

In the past few years, as the nation has slowly and ineffectually come to grips with the illegal immigration problem, several left-of-center cities have, with a flurry of misplace self-righteousness, enacted “sanctuary city” laws, instructing their police not to check the immigration status of people they contacted on other police matters.  “We don’t pay our police to be immigration officers” was a common quote from the various officials involved – introducing the question “do we pay you to be child support enforcers or collections officers for the car insurance industry?”, or, more on-point, “aren’t laws laws, to be enforced pretty much across the board?”

At any rate, I’m sure you’ve heard the news – the three college students executed in Newark were allegedly shot by a man who’d been picked up on another crime – but not held, since Newark was one of the self-righteous cities that was above all of that persecution:

Jose Carranza, an illegal immigrant from Peru, was indicted twice this year: 31 counts surrounding the alleged sexual assault of a child, and nine stemming from a bar fight

While the left barbers endlessly about the alleged venality and hatefulness of right-wing groups, it would seem all the genuine hate-based violence in this country is coming…

…from the left.  Via the LA Weekly, a fascinating, and eye-opening, story about the nascence of a violent animal-rights “movement” whose ends, to it, justify the means:

On Sunday, June 24, just that kind of person struck. Rosenbaum, a highly regarded pediatric ophthalmologist who had been regularly harassed by animal-rights activists for his research work with cats and rhesus monkeys at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, noticed a device underneath his luxury sedan. The bomb squad was dispatched to the scene and hauled away a makeshift — but deadly — explosive. A faulty fuse was the only reason it didn’t go off.

Three days later, the so-called Animal Liberation Brigade sent a typo-riddled “communiqué” to the North American Animal Liberation Press Office in Los Angeles. It was posted on the NAALPO Web site:

Read the whole thing.

Joel Rosenberg on the latest in the Treptow case – the June 7 incident in Coon Rapids where a citizen with a carry permit shot a road-raging driver who (allegedly) pointed a gun at his wife, and later turned out to be an undercover cop:

The only real news, such as it is, is a rumor.  (I think it’s likely true, mind you, but it is rumor, at the moment; I’m working to get a source on deep background or better).  Seems that Officer Friendly [Joel’s pseudonym for the officer] has been kicked off the state Drug Task Force, and is back at Robbinsdale, working as an “investigator.”  He’s not a detective — not that there’s anything wrong with that; the title “patrolman” is an honorable one, and many terrific cops spend their entire career in that rank — but has been assigned as an undercover “investigator” to keep his name and his records from becoming public.  (Under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, if a cop is on anything but an undercover assignment, his name, his shift information, disciplinary information, etc., becomes public data.  While he’s on undercover status, it isn’t.)

Interesting.  Hypothetically, if a police chief were to be assigning a cop to an “undercover” role inspecting the break room to see if any of the doughtnuts have escaped, what would be the proper way to fix that? After all, the purpose of the exclusions in the MGDPA aren’t to give political cover from embarrassment to police officials. 

Rumors – all unconfirmed, all exactly that, rumors – indicate the officer might have a bit of a history of being a little boisterous. 

As to his police career, it’s been cooked.  He’ll never testify as a prosecution witness; it would be child’s play for a defense attorney to destroy his credibility on the stand with the events around June 7. 

But this can’t stand.  As one three-decade retired veteran of the MPD recently said, it’s important that bad cops be exposed and disciplined, or the stink rubs off on all. 

 And in a metro area whose crime problems are, in some areas, becoming out of control, maintaining confidence among the citizenry is important.

Meanwhile, from the Anoka County Attorney’s office — the office which will prosecute Officer Friendly for his actions on June 7, if anybody does — what have we heard?

Silence.

That can’t last long.