Question:  If you were storing a car in your garage for the winter, would you carry insurance on it?

If you’d discovered you didn’t read the Strib anymore, would you continue to pay for the subscription?

If you got an hour’s exercise a day by biking or running or swimming, would you pay for a gym membership?

No, no and probably not, I’m guessing.

Careful.  Award-winning journalist ® Karl Bremer might accuse you of driving without insurance, illiteracy and being out of shape…

…well, no.  That’s not quite right.  He’d write a piece on his blog Ripple in Stillwater with a headline like “Is Joe Schmo Driving Without Insurance?”, or “Is Mary Moe Illiterate?” or “Is Evonne Yeo Obese And Out Of Shape?”, listing the factoids and not a whole lot more.

One of the great plagues of the “alternative media” – and by that, I mean mostly the left-wing alternative media – is the “I’ll ask an inflammatory question – one with either no facts to back it up, or facts presented with no context that would help the uninformed that are my target audience decide whether it’s a valid quesiton – and let it dangle out there”.

It’s sort of like this classic South Park spoof of Glenn Beck…:

Which brings us to this piece from Bremer’s Ripple, in which he writes:

Throughout her political career, Michele Bachmann has rarely passed up an opportunity to burnish her lawyerly credentials by claiming that she’s a “tax litigation attorney.” And for almost as long, Bachmann hasn’t even been authorized to practice law in her home state of Minnesota.

Now, it appears that Bachmann’s license to practice law in Minnesota should not only be unauthorized, but suspended and placed on “not in good standing” status for failure to comply with the “Rules of the Supreme Court on Lawyer Registration.”…

…

This is only the latest in a long history of sloppy record-keeping, tardy legal filings and questionable campaign reports that litter Bachmann’s political career. Will anyone care enough to enforce the law this time?

You bet!

But since the allegations are coming from the award-winning journalist ® Karl Bremer, perhaps it’s not my place to check it out.  I’m no award winning journalist ® after all – I’m a mere uppity peasant.

So I wrote a couple of lawyer friends of mine; Joe Doakes of Como Park, and Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci (*).  And, for good measure, called the Minnesota Judicial Branch, which maintains the lists of lawyers that practice in Minnesota and, by the way, which Bremer cited.

And the answer I got?  To borrow a quote from Joe Pesci in the greatest movie ever made about the law in America, My Cousin Vinny, “Everything that guy just said is bullsh*t”.

Let’s break down Bremer’s charges, one by one:

“Suspended” Disbelief: Let’s go back to that last paragraph:

Now, it appears that Bachmann’s license to practice law in Minnesota should not only be unauthorized, but suspended and placed on “not in good standing” status for failure to comply with the “Rules of the Supreme Court on Lawyer Registration.”

Bremer writes this because Bachmann’s record with the Minnesota Judicial Branch reads “Not Authorized”.  Here, take a look.  It says she’s “Not Authorized Resident, Not Practicing in MN / Voluntarily Restricted (By Choice).

What does this mean?  I mean, to me – a mere uppity peasant – it appears that she may have taken her license out of “active” status to pursue another career for bit.   But what do I know?

Doakes – not an award-winning ® journalist, but a lawyer – explains:

Mr. Bremer doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He reminds me of the guy who has read the “to coin money” phrase in the Constitution, interprets it to mean the only valid money is gold coinage, and therefore refuses to pay his mortgage. In similarly erroneous fashion, reading the plain English words in the Rules governing lawyer licenses doesn’t mean he understands how the Rules are applied in real life.

 First, Ms. Bachman’s license to practice law has NOT lapsed – she has voluntarily self-limited her license precisely as provided by the Rules. She could un-self-limit her license at any time as provided in the Rules (notify the Court, pay a fee, catch up on classes).

Sort of like letting the insurance lapse on a car you keep stored; it doesn’t preclude reinstating the insurance and going back on the road.

Unless you’re a conservative and you wander into Karl Bremer’s attention span.

Second, the Rules provide several different categories of lawyers – some actively practicing law and some not – for the excellent reason that some people may want to take a break from representing clients day-to-day in order to do something else (missionary work, for example, or perhaps public service) [Or serve in Congress – Ed.] but also want to be able to resume practicing law later, without having to retake the Bar Exam. This regulatory scheme is designed to let lawyers “park” their licenses for a time. It’s perfectly legal and commonly used.

Another friend of mine, also an attorney, raised some eyebrows when she let her Minnesota license go inactive.  It seemed odd – except her firm was giving her nothing but cases in Iowa and the Dakotas.  It only made sense to keep her active licenses there, but keep her MN license inactive until she really needed it.  Does it mean she’s “not following the rules”, as Bremer would claim?

Rep. Bachmann, with her LL.D in Tax Law from William and Mary, practices a fairly abstruse flavor of law.  Since she’s not currentlytrying cases, the license renewal is, at this moment in her life, an unneeded extra complication and expense – especially since it’s a relatively simple matter to get it back should she need it again.

My pseudonymous lawyers aren’t good enough for you?  Fair enough; I called the Minnesota Judicial Branch, and the Board of Continuing Legal Education.  They confirmed it. “Lots of attorneys go inactive when they are out of state, not practicing, or not in a position to do their Continuing Legal Education” due to, say, being in Congress, said a MJB employee who asked not to be named.

Paid Up: Bremer wrote:

Lawyers licensed to practice law in Minnesota are required to register annually with the Lawyer Registration Office in the Minnesota Judicial Branch. They’re also required to pay an annual registration fee that varies depending on the lawyer’s active/inactive status, income level, residence and years in the profession.

And – mirabile dictu  – she paid her fee!  Check out her MJB record; third line down?  “Last Payment:  7/11/11”.

Joe Tucci – a lawyer and member of the Minnesota Bar – notes:

I would add that the dues you are required to pay when you are on voluntary restricted status are about $100 less than on active status. If you have no prospect of representing clients in your jurisdiction because you are working in a different career out of state (which also hinders your ability to keep up on your CLEs), it just makes sense to to go on voluntary restricted status.

Hm.

States Of Existence:  Remember when Bremer insisted that there is something in Bachmann’s status that is deeply prejudicial?

Now, it appears that Bachmann’s license to practice law in Minnesota should not only be unauthorized, but suspended and placed on “not in good standing” status for failure to comply with the “Rules of the Supreme Court on Lawyer Registration.”

He even quoted the letter of the law…:

“A lawyer or judge who fails to meet all of the criteria to be on either active or inactive status is placed on non-compliant status, and the right to practice law in this state is automatically suspended,” the Supreme Court Rules state. “A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status is not in good standing. A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status must not practice law in this state, must not hold out himself or herself as authorized to practice law, or in any manner represent that he or she is qualified or authorized to practice law while on non-compliant status. Any lawyer or judge who violates this rule is subject to all the penalties and remedies provided by law for the unauthorized practice of law in the State of Minnesota.”

Wait a minute – where on the record does it say that Bachmann is in any sort of “non-compliant status?”  Check for yourself!

If you can’t find anything but the phrase “Not Authorized to Practice”, join the club.  Doakes notes that there is nothign to Bremer’s claim but, well, Bremer being Bremer:

Third, the phrase “Not Authorized to Practice” is not as ominous as it sounds. It has no negative connotation. The Rule is binary – you’re either Authorized or you’re Not Authorized.

And Doakes offers something Bremer didn’t – context:

For comparison purposes, here’s Michelle Bachman’s information.

And here’s the information for [another prominent local attorney].

And here’s the information about former Court of Appeals Judge Rollie Amundson, who was convicted of stealing from his clients and sent to prison.

You’ll notice all their licenses both are listed as Not Authorized but for different reasons: Ms. Bachmann’s because she’s chosen to stop representing clients while she serves in government, Mr. Shadduck’s because he’s dead, and Mr. Amundson’s because he hasn’t paid his annual fees. “Not Authorized” doesn’t mean “bad lawyer;” it simply means “not authorized.”

Because award-winning journalists ® don’tneed to give complete, accurate context, I guess:

Where? Finally, Bremer attacked Bachmann’s attention to paperwork in re reporting her address:

The Supreme Court Rules also require that “Every lawyer or judge must immediately notify the Lawyer Registration Office of any change of postal address. Every lawyer or judge who elects to use the online registration system must immediately update their online registration profile to reflect any change of their postal address and email address.”

That rule is clearly referenced on the Minnesota Judicial Branch website on Updating Lawyer Registration.

Bachmann paid her most recent annual registration fee on July 11, 2011. Her address listed on her registration is 1801 Johnson Drive, Stillwater, MN. But Bachmann hasn’t lived at that address for nearly four years.

That would appear to put Bachmann in noncompliance with the Supreme Court Rules—not just this year, but for at least the past three years.

“A lawyer or judge who fails to meet all of the criteria to be on either active or inactive status is placed on non-compliant status, and the right to practice law in this state is automatically suspended,” the Supreme Court Rules state. “A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status is not in good standing. A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status must not practice law in this state, must not hold out himself or herself as authorized to practice law, or in any manner represent that he or she is qualified or authorized to practice law while on non-compliant status. Any lawyer or judge who violates this rule is subject to all the penalties and remedies provided by law for the unauthorized practice of law in the State of Minnesota.”

 

Doakes, however, notes that Bremer is just making stuff up now:

Fourth, I know the plain English words in the Rule say you must update even an Inactive registration but nobody updates an Inactive registration while it’s still Inactive; you update your registration when it goes Active again, when you want to resume practice. Take another look at Mr. Shadduck and Mr. Amundson’s addresses – they use their last address from the time they last were in Active practice. That’s the common and widely accepted practice and Ms. Bachmann is following it.

And if that were not the case? Well, Bremer’s gonna be one busy little award-winning ® wannabe muckracker:

Finally, to address the major point of Mr. Bremer’s column, the phrase “postal address” in the Rule does not require you to list your HOME mailing address, the place where you eat and sleep, but only to list SOME mailing address at which the Court can send notices to you. In this age of wackos with instant Internet access to public records [heh heh – Ed.], NOBODY gives the home address where they actually spend their days and nights, on their registration.

[Ramsey County Judge] Robert Awsumb doesn’t list his home address.

Nor does the leading personal injury lawyer in the state and founder of Schwebel, Goetz and Sieben.

Nor even ordinary government bureaucrats, such as the Attorney General, Lori Swanson.

And see United States Senator Amy Klobuchar, another Minnesota lawyer now serving in Congress.

Swanson and Klobuchar? Scofflaws?

Er, Karl Bremer?  You’ve got some wrongdoing to expose!  Our Attorney General and Senior Senator should both be chastised, shunned, and disbarred, by the logic in your own story!

You get right on that!

Doakes concludes:

Not Authorized to Practice – Voluntarily Restricted – and showing an address where she doesn’t actually eat and sleep on a daily basis (Senator Klobuchar lives somewhere closer to her job in Washington, DC, obviously, and simply maintains this condo in Minnesota for residency purposes). Nothing wrong with that – perfectly common practice for lawyers in government service. Such as Ms. Bachmann.

Mr. Bremer may have read the Rules governing lawyer registration, but he doesn’t understand them. Oh, and he still has to pay his mortgage, too.

The moral of the story?  If it’s the Twin Cities award-winning ® leftymedia, and they’re writing about conservatives?  Distrust, then verify.

Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.

(And the very nice lady from the Minnesota Judicial Branch?  She confirmed everything Doakes and Tucci said).

UPDATE:  Another rep from the Continuing Legal Education office called back.  “Someone who voluntarily suspends their license but keeps their fees paid up is in good standing”.

As opposed to, y’know, bad standing.

(more…)

Back in 1994, I left the GOP; I was angry that they’d caved in to Clinton on the 1994 Crime Bill.  I joined the Libertarian Party.

I came back to the GOP in 1998.  It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with the Libertarians, at least in the broad outlines.  It was that the Libertarians had no chance of ever governing anything – and no idea how to effect any governance even if they did  manage to win an election.

Rock-ribbed principle is a great thing; it drives movements that move mountains.  But once that movement gets into office, those same people have to work with other people who believe very different things.

And it’s there that the hard part begins; upholding one’s princples, and meeting people who also got elected to office, to uphold very different prinicples, halfway to do the job of running a government.

The problem is, there is no way for anyone to remain absolutely pure to principle, if by that you mean “never play ball, on any level, with the opposition”.

It’s how you get all the influence of a Libertarian Party.

Gary Gross writes over at True North:

Apparently, some TEA Party organizations are slamming people like Col. Alan West for being RINOs. That’s led to Col. West defending himself on Laura Ingraham’s show this morning. Bully for him and bully for Ms. Laura for her steadfast support for Col. West. Here’s the tape of their conversation:

Go ahead and listen.

And remember – if you win you have to govern.  If you can’t govern, you won’t win again.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to ditch your principles to govern; it does mean you should bargain them at the highest price possible.

We’ve known it for decades; raising taxes in a recession is stupid, stupid, stupid.

But being a liberal means believing history just doesn’t apply to you:

CME Group Inc. is evaluating whether to move some operations to other states from Chicago to reduce its taxes, but it has not decided on an exact timeline, CEO Craig Donohue said Thursday.

“Our tax situation is untenable,” Donohue told Reuters, noting that CME is taxed more heavily than any of its global competitors. The company is talking with at least three states — Texas, Florida and Tennessee — about relocating some of its business to take advantage of lower tax rates there, Donohue said.

Illinois bucked the trend that New York and (to some extent) Calfornia recognized; that not only do you have to cut spending (because government is out of control) but that taxes inhibit revenue.

As little as governmetn at any level does that’s of any worth, there is a certain amount of responsibility involved.

When it became apparent that there’s a chance the Fed might shut down (or at least cut back its non-debt spending), both Denise Cardinal “Governor Dayton” and Rep. Keith Downey made moves, via their various means (executive and legislative), to start planning how to manage the state without some or all of the billions of dollars in federal money that Minnesota gets.   It only made sense.

Then intellectual giants in the legislative DFL caucus got their two cents in:

The bill passed committee on April 28, but not before being mocked as a “doomsday scenario” by Representative Ryan Winkler (DFL – Golden Valley), who offered an amendment to also ask the state to plan for “asteroid collisions, nuclear war, extraterrestrial invasions, coup d’tat and natural disasters caused by global warming.” Winkler withdrew the amendment after being mocked by Republicans for not taking the issue seriously.

Winkler may or may not be much of a legislator – he’s the Eddie Haskell of the House – but he certainly has a flair for the dramatic (emphasis added, but only to mock the little fella):

“I think you know that this bill doesn’t address a situation that’s anywhere close to reality.  It’s fantasy. I’m afraid it might be a partisan fantasy to see failure on this colossal of a scale. Frankly if the federal government became insolvent I‘m not so concerned about the effect on state programs; I would be concerned about the looters who are gonna be running through our neighborhoods. You are talking about almost an Armageddon kind of situation happening in the country where the United States basically falls apart…”

In Ryan Winkler’s special little world, government makes life itself possible.

I’d love to watch a solid, sharp, conservative debating Winkler.  It would look like a butcher pounding veal with a big hammer.

Paul Krugman – who is to Nobel Prizes what John Kerry was to Vietnam – wants to prove that Ronald Reagan never did anything useful for the economy, and he doesn’t care how sharply he has to shave the facts and the historical context to do it:

Reagan did not start an era of unprecedented growth by any measure: employment, GDP, productivity, whatever. But maybe the easiest way to see what didn’t happen is to look at median family income in constant dollars:

The NYTimes helpfully provided a graph:

Krugman:

 A spectacular increase during the high-tax, strong-union postwar generation; fitful improvement since, with the only sustained rise during the Clinton years. That’s the story; it’s amazing how many people don’t know it.

“That’s the story” Krugman says; high taxes (and unions, he adds in a non-sequitur) cause prosperity.

Like household income exists in a vacuum, affected only by taxes (and union membership).

I’m tempted to drive to New York, collar Krugman, and ask “what else happened during this timeline?”

What else happened between 1947 and 1971, besides unfettered taxes and government growth?  Like, the German and Japanese economies starting the period in ruins, and spending the entire period rebuilding?  China and India starting as third-world countries, enduring forty years of socialist governments that couldn’t feed their own people?  And,  respectively, a mass-murdering socialist dictatorship and civil wars?

Did Germany and Japan only get their economies rebuilt, and start to seriously compete with the US, in the late sixties and early seventies – about the time America’s rise in income leveled off?

Did America’s unions develop their high-salary, high-benefit, often low-skill paradigm perhaps because America’s economy had no competition?  The whole world was America’s market for those 25 years!

(And when Germany and Japan’s economies took off, they adopted high-tax, high-“service”, strong-union systems.  And when did their performance start levelling off?

That’s right, it shot up like a rocket from reconstruction until 1990…

…until China and India and Taiwan and the Republic of Korea started performing.

But don’t mind that.  According to “nobel-prize-winning” economist Paul Krugman, none of that matters.  Just taxes.

Media academics:  Distrust, then verify. Then, usually, distrust some more.

UPDATE:  I almost missed this:  Krugman also noted that the US prospered during the relatively high-tax Clinton era, and had troubles during the relatively low-tax Bush administration.

Right.  And Clinton benefitted from cashing the “peace dividend” won during the low-tax, high-prosperity Reagan administration.  And while Bush presided over prosperity from 2003-2007, he suffered from the deflation of the tech bubble early in his administration (exacerbated by a terrorist attack some of you may remember, but which Krugman clearly does not) and, of course, the housing crash, neither of which had anything to do with Bush’s tax cuts.

Governor Dayton engineered the shutdown, specifically to cause as much pain as possible, under the command of his various union benefactors.

Andy Post ad MDE has the smoking gun:

New communications obtained by Minnesota Democrats Exposed today offer further proof the longest and largest state government shutdown in history was plotted out between Gov. Dayton and union leaders well in advance. The decision to shutdown was very much a political calculation made by the Administration at the hands of AFSCME.

A local president sent the following letter to his members to report on the results of the AFSCME Minnesota Council 5 CPC meeting in which the results of the shutdown were discussed. Here’s some of the letter:

If you haven’t read the whole thing, you should.

And then file it all away for November of 2012, and then 2014.