The DFL controlled Minnesota state senate– perhaps concerned about the optics of giving massive pay raises to government officials in the state where in the “economic recovery” is affecting mainly, well, government officials – rejected Gov. Dayton’s call for the massive pain increases yesterday.
“Now I know how President Obama feels. I’m confronted with two hostile bodies of the Legislature,” Dayton told reporters hours after the state Senate voted overwhelmingly to put the brakes on the big salary increases to commissioners that Dayton had ordered.
Dayton said he trusted Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt but would no longer deal with Bakk without someone else in room.
It’s not news; Tom Bakk and Mark Dayton don’t get along. It’s hard to blame Bock; the Iron Range is drifting slowly to the right, but Dayton’s administration is a wholly owned subsidiary of big metro money.
Maybe there is some devious political maneuvering behind what seems to a political layperson like an outburst, a tantrum. It’s entirely possible; I’m just not that bright.
But I’m wondering if this, here, might not be relevant sooner than later.
President Obama says Muslims are ignorant, medieval racists.
Well, not in so many words. But the point of drawing a moral equivalency between Muslims, the Inquisition and slavery in the Old South is that all three examples are equally bad so we shouldn’t single out Muslims for disapproval.
Agreed. Except Christians abandoned the Inquisition and abolished slavery in the Old South, and thereby made the world a better place. Only one bad thing left for Christians to rid the world of, Mr. President. When should we expect you to get started on that?
Joe Doakes.
Western Civilization, Christendom and America fought through immense internal upheaval to deal with the latter two.
Less than two years after Minnesota raised its cigarette tax to one of the highest in the country, cigarette smuggling has become a growing business in the state. Now officials want more money to combat the problem.
Minnesota Department of Revenue officials seized or assessed untaxed tobacco products in more than 40 percent of the 374 retail inspections conducted through the first three quarters of last year. Before the cigarette tax jumped $1.60 per pack, or 130 percent, retail inspections found untaxed tobacco products only 8 percent of the time. The agency typically conducts 700 inspections a year.
Four Muslims in Porte Dorée (the Golden door), a ghetto east of Paris, beat artist Combo after he refused to take down his Coexist street art. Combo suffered a dislocated shoulder, bruises and a black eye.
To be fair, I’ve been tempted to do the same thing to graffiti artists. But again, only using the one-two punch of ridicule and derision.
Charles Manson’s wedding is off again after the spree killer and cult leader discovers his betrothed really just wants to build a museum around him:
They apparently thought the Lenin’s Tomb-esque attraction would draw a huge number of visitors and make a lot of money.
But Manson, 80, apparently got wind of the plan and now no longer wants to marry Burton.
“He’s finally realized that he’s been played for a fool,” Simone told The NY Post.
It would have been an ironic turning of the tables…
The tourist attraction was also something of a non-starter because Manson believes he is immortal.
“He feels he will never die,” Simone added. “Therefore, he feels it’s a stupid idea to begin with.”
To be fair, I remember worse business plans back during the dotcom era.
Over the weekend on the Northern Alliance, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey and I got together for the long-threatened “Worst Music of the Seventies” episode.
We picked some true horrors between us; “Last Song” by Edward Bear, “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by Lobo, “Convoy” by CW McCall, and on and on.
But the general consensus was, the worst of the lot was “I’ve Never Been To Me” by Charlene, one of Ed’s nominations.
If you’re of a certain age, or were accidentally exposed by other means, you’ve heard the song. But just in case you haven’t heard it, I’ll put it right here for you.
WARNING: You can’t un-hear this song
I remembered the song all too well – although not as well as I thought I did, which only means that the human psyche is designed to protect itself. It came out in 1977, not 1979, as I thought I remembered. But I wasn’t completely off; Mary McGregor, most famous for her 1978 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers) released, heaven help us, a cover of the song in ’79, which was the one I remember playing at my first radio job.
But as Ed, King and I played some of the worst music of all time, I took my mind off the pain by looking up factoids about the various songs. And I learned some amazing stuff; careers started, lost and restarted; major names in the industry slumming between major breaks, or prostituting themselves to find their first major break.
And the story behind this wretched, wretched song was far from an exception. It involves the classic story; a girl, a songwriter, a producer, and a douchebag disk jockey.
The Girl: Charlene (born Charlene D’Angelo, although her first stage name was Charlene Duncan, after her her first husband, a justifiably obscure record producer. She had some chops; she was 23 when she was signed to a subsidiary of Motown.
Yes, Motown. Signed by no other than…
The Producer: Berry Gordy, the Father of Motown and one of America’s legendary musical impresarios. And he’s listed as one of “I’ve Never Been…”‘s producers.
Of course, not everyone Gordy signed was a Temptations or a Four Seasons or a Marvin Gaye, or even a Flaming Ember. Gordy had his finger in a lot of different musical pies, and had a staff of people who cranked out music in all sorts of genres.
Which leads us to…
The Songwriters: The song was written by Ron Miller and Ken Hirsch. You may not have heard of them; not everyone can be Lennon and McCartney, Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King. Someone has to be Freddie and the Dreamers, Billy Crudup, or Neil Sedaka. And that was where Ron Miller and Ken Hirsch fit into the music business.
Not without success, mind you; Miller wrote a string of hits for Stevie Wonder (“A Place in the Sun”, “Heaven Help Us All”, and “Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday”), Diana Ross (“Touch Me in the Morning”) and a trove of other music that hovers just outside the edges of the American musical conscience. And Hirsch was a professional co-writer, having teamed up with Hal David, Howard Greenfield, Doc Pomus, Gerry Goffin, Carole Bayer Sager, Paul Williams and a dog’s breakfast of lesser lights; he scored hits, albeit minor ones, for everyone from Ray Charles to Air Supply.
Together, they teamed up and, in the style of the times, wrote “I’ve Never Been To Me”. And they gave it to…
…well, everyone. R&B singer Randy Crawford did it first; Nancy “Not The One From Heart” Wilson and Walter Jackson both did it the same year Charlene first released it, and the covers (including MacGregor’s, which was the only one to make serious bank before 1982) kept coming.
The lack of sales dogged Charlene; after her second album, Gordy dropped her. She retired from the music business, and moved to England, where she married a Brit, Jeff Oliver. Sh was working in a candy store in London in 1982.
The Douchebag Disc Jockey: Scott Shannon is legendary in the radio business. This may be good, or it may be bad, depending on your point of view; as a mid-market program director in the mid-eighties, he was one of the prime movers behind “CHR”, or “Contemporary Hit Radio”, which was what “Top Forty” became by the early nineties. He also was one of the pioneers of the “Morning Zoo” format. By the early nineties, he was one of the people that smaller-market program directors – including my boss at the time, at KDWB – worshipped and emulated.
If you don’t have a big background in radio, you might have heard of him one of three ways: he had a really awful TV and radio countdown show back in the nineties; today, he’s one of the hosts of a show called “Dish Nation”, an ultra-cheapo knockoff of “TMZ” which takes footage from various morning radio shows around the country and edits them into a half-hour…well, ultra cheap knockoff of TMZ. And he’s been the voice-over guy in all of Sean Hannity’s breakbeds since Hannity went national.
But in 1982, he was working as a program director in Tampa, looking to make a splash and make it to the bigs. And while vaccuuming out the oldies bin, he came across Charlene’s 1977 flop.
And started playing it.
Nobody knows why. Shannon officially said he liked the song; the more I read about the song’s resurgence, the more I think it involved an intoxicated wager that he, and the world, lost.
No matter; Shannon played it, and played it to death. Major-market program directors in those days were basically herd animals; if they saw a PD adding a song to his playlist, they’d stampede to follow suit. No, seriously; “Roxette” became a hit in the US because one PD, KDWB’s Brian Phillips, added them; dozens of other PDs ran in a panicked mob to add the song, not wanting to be left out of…well, whatever it was.
And so Charlene Oliver was dragged out of retirement, put into her wedding dress (really) and dragged out to an English major house to record a video, and became a star, briefly
The Aftermath: The song went to #3. And then disappeared. As, basically, did Charlene. Motown featured her in a huge publicity campaign, including the movie “The Last Dragon”, featuring cameos and music by a raft of new Motown stars (Vanity, DeBarge, Rockwell, and others, including Charlene). The others garnered a brief career boost; Charlene faded back into obscurity.
So just remember, kids; talent and hard work might get you someplace. But being in the right place at the right time has no substitute.
I was listening to Jack Tomczak talking with AFSCME’s Javier Morillo on the lesser talk station yesterday, about the Dayton pay raises.
Morillo said, out of one corner of his mouth, that there is no way you could find people in the private sector who deal with headcounts and budgets like these administrators do, at the same pay, even with the raises.
And there may be something to that. Most people who can hold their own in the private sector and look for more out of a career than a pension (outside of law enforcement and fire, the military, teachers and a few other fields) look at government work as a purgatory of eternal frustration and career stagnation.
But out of the other side of his mouth, he said that the salaries still aren’t competitive with the private sector.
So if the salaries are not competitive, the “talent” still isn’t going to get attracted from the private sector (or, apparently, local government). So why have the raises?
It doesn’t make sense as a “talent acquisition” measure; Morillo admitted as much.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t like Sen. Rand Paul’s proposal to have the federal government audit the Federal Reserve.
“Who in their right mind would ask the Congress of the United States — who can’t cobble together a fiscal policy — to assume control of monetary policy?” Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said during an interview with The Hill.
“To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures . . . .”
The Founders knew Congress wasn’t going to be made up of experts so they adopted the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) which, in those days, meant Gold or Silver coins of a known weight and purity. Easy to recognize, hard to counterfeit, holds its value internationally and over time.
Modern experts can argue whether the gold standard is good or bad, but one thing’s for sure – it’s much harder for a privately held corporation to flood the market with trillions of dollars’ worth of gold coins in response to political pressure than it is to dump $40 Billion dollars of electrons into the economy, month after month, without any oversight at all.
Joe Doakes
Remember how the Catholic Church used to kill people who translated the Bible from Latin to “Vulgate”, regular languages?
Sometimes it feels like the government wants to put its entire body of laws, constitution included, in a separate language that nobody understands.
And looking at the way our schools are performing these days, that language just might end up being English…
Last week, David Chanen of the Strib wrote a piece – a decent one, actually – about the straw-purchase flim-flam that put a gun in the hand of Ray Kmetz, the New Hope shooter who was legally barred from owning guns at all.
And the story omitted something that almost no story about guns in the Twin Cities media has, in recent or even distant memory.
There was no obligatory, supercilious, and utterly wrong quote from Heather Martens!
Of course, several commenters, starting with Mr. D, got it within minutes of my posting this morning. Y’all know me too well.
Still, this is a virtual rupture of the space-time continuum.
What next? A Strib piece about politics that doesn’t quote Larry Jacobs?
The DFL is in the midst of an extended campaign of sniveling about the amount of money in politics.
A look at this list of independent expenditures registered from the 10 Minnesota House races that flipped last election shows you why:
The DFL spent more. Sometimes a helluvva lot more. And it didn’t work.
Courtesy John Rouleau of the MN Jobs Coalition, via Twitter.
The candidate with the most indy spending in each race is color-flagged.
Of 10 races, DFL groups outspent GOP groups in eight of them, notching a little over 10% more independent spending. And that doesn’t even tell the whole story.
Remember all the whining Zach Dorholt did the Twin Cities media did on Zach Dorhold’s behalf about big money in his district? His independent expenditures were 20% higher than Knoblach’s.
The GOP spent more on Peggy Bennet than the DFL wasted on Shannon Savick – by about $4,000. That speaks to what a terrible campaign Savick ran, and what a lousy term she had in office – and the power of the grass roots that turned out to bounce her. Don’t screw with the Second Amendment outstate!
On the other hand – Erickson vs. Hancock (over 2:1 in favor of the DFLer) and Fritz vs. Daniel (almost 3:1 for the DFL?) Holy cow.
Against that, the GOP indies only outspent the DFL in two of the flips; the Bennet/Savick race, as already noted, and a 15% margin in the Heintzelman/Ward race.
So no wonder the DFL is so concerned about rationing money in politics; theirs didn’t work. They need less competition.
Last week, the Strib ran a story about a gun issue – a story by David Chanen about New Hope city hall shooter Ray Kmetz and his illegal access to a shotgun, via an illegal straw buyer.
And something was missing.
Did anyone notice it but me?
Leave your guesses in the comment section: answer over the noon hour.
Republicans say the raises are outrageous, especially because many commissioners were already making six-figure salaries. But Dayton said the salary hikes were necessary to attract and retain top talent to state government. He says it also puts state pay in line with other units of government.
“I want the best people, and I want them to be able to support their families,” Dayton said. “Obviously the salaries are a lot of money, but I’ve had people leave state government, my commissioners, to go over to local governments and make 50 percent more than I was able to pay them.”
I’m not sure what astounds me more; that Dayton can get away with this, or how it is he figures that local government is getting “the best people”.
As we’ve seen, lots of money doesn’t get “the best…” anything in government.
Unless it’s not “the best” results they’re talking about…
The Strib ran a relatively decent story about the background of the New Hope shooting incident, where 68 year old Ray Kmetz, using an illegally-obtained 12 gauge shotgun, shot and wounded two New Hope police officers before being killed.
The officers are recovering, Kmetz is dead, and the issue is mostly closed…
…except for the matter of Michael Garant.
All Straw, Nothing But Straw: Garant purchased several shotguns from an online gun auction. According to the Strib story:
Kmetz was the highest bidder for three shotguns from K-Bid Auction in Maple Plain, which were actually bought by Garant in August at Full Metal Gun Shop in Princeton, authorities have said. Garant informed gun shop owner Troy Buchholz that he used the alias “Ray Kmetz” during the online auction because he didn’t want people contacting him from K-Bid’s site, according to court documents.
Show me a law-abiding gun owner who doesn’t look at that story and ask “who does Garant think he is? The BATFE?”
As the story notes, the gun shop screwed up bad; the Strib writer (one David Chanen) talked with John Monson of Bill’s Gun Shop, who spelled out how it’s supposed to work. Long story short: not like that.
Longer story shorter; Garant allegedly used an illegal purchasing tactic to put a gun in the hands of Ray Kmetz.
And Garant is being charged. End of story. Right?
Not My Job, Man: Back in the 1990s, after some high profile shootings, the legislature and some city councils worked to give county prosecutors some tools to use against gun criminals, including straw buyers. These were laws that had the combined, bipartisan approval of anti-gun zealots and pro-Second Amendment Real Americans, by the way – because they went after criminals, rather than the law-abiding gun owner.
And the county prosecutors used those to tear into criminals who used guns with a vengeance.
No, not really. The laws largely languished. Sources tell me that former Ramsey County attorney Susan Gaertner pled the charges from the laws away as parts of plea bargain deals every single time, sticking zero gun criminals with charges stemming from the anti-gun-crime laws.
And yes, prosecutors have some discretion in their charges, and plea bargains are a useful tool for unclogging the courts. But it’s also no surprise that an extreme gun-grabber prosecutor would avoid the use of a law that might provide objective evidence that gun violence is a matter of violent people, not availability of firearms.
Susan Gaertner was that anti-Second-Amendment extremist. And some say Henco prosecutor Mike Freeman is, too (although he’s made a few good calls in his career)
Gun shop screws up bigtime.
Bored To Tears: When the police traced Ray Kmetz’s shotgun, the trail led to Garant.
You don’t need an expert to know what happened; Kmetz, who had been civilly committed several times, was utterly unable to buy a firearm. Garant allegedly bought the gun, using Kmetz’s name but his own background – and then showed up at the gun shop in Princeton and bought the gun under his own name.
How illegal is it? John Monson of Bill’s Gun Range calls it:
“This was a classic straw purchase,” Monson said. “If this guy couldn’t get arrested and charged, who could?”Monson says “internal process woulda stopped this cold”.
After the New Hope shooting, police traced the gun to Garant, and arrested him; it was the Thursday afternoon after the shooting took place.
And on Friday, notwithstanding the fact that the prosecutors have 36 hours to investigate and come up with evidence, Henco attorney Mike Freeman cut Garant loose – according to sources with knowledge of the situation, Garant was released as the Henco Sheriff’s office was still investigating.
Sheriff Stanek was not amused:
Sheriff Rich Stanek said he was befuddled by that decision. “We absolutely had state law supporting us,” he said. “We just need enforcement of current law.”
The state statute on straw buyers reads that “whoever recklessly furnishes a person with a dangerous weapon in conscious disregard of a known substantial risk that the object will be possessed or used in furtherance of a felony crime of violence is guilty of a felony.”
Stanek said he understands that the county attorney has prosecutorial discretion, but he believes the Legislature’s intent in creating the law supported charges against Garant.
According to Henco prosector Freeman (as related in the Strib), it was just too much a stretch (echoing Dakota County attorney and anti-gun zealot Jim Backstrom,who seems to think his attorneys are too incompetent to tell the difference between a murder and self-defense).
Subd. 1c.Felony; furnishing dangerous weapon. Whoever recklessly furnishes a person with a dangerous weapon in conscious disregard of a known substantial risk that the object will be possessed or used in furtherance of a felony crime of violence is guilty of a felony and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than ten years or to payment of a fine of not more than $20,000, or both.
Garant admitted to furnishing the weapon. The Strib story indicates there’s evidence that Garant knew Kmetz’s record made him ineligible to buy it himself. Proving Garant knew there was “substantial risk” – well, isn’t that why all those attorneys make the big taxpayer bucks? Admitting he knew Kmetz was unqualified is the very definition of “knowing and reckless!”
This should have been a no-brainer for Freeman’s office.
So why would Mike Freeman let a case like this slide, only for the Feds to pick it up?
Because he doesn’t want to give any, er, ammo to the Second Amendment movement by using a law we support to put an obvious criminal in jail?
Road Not Taken: But that last graf of mine is conjecture.
And it’s about the best I can manage right now – because I’m a mere blogger. A guy who writes polemics in his spare time, works a full time day job, yadda yadda.
You know what would help, though?
If there were an institution – perhaps one that owned things like printing presses and transmitters and, nowadays, websites. And maybe staffed by people whose job it is to look into stories like “why doesn’t the county attorney in the state’s most violent county use the straw buyer law to pin local charges on a guy who put a gun in the hands of a man who shot two cops?” People who, perhaps, consider themselves part of a near-monastic order of people who consider “the peoples’ right to know” a sacred calling, above reproach by mere lay people, but which exist to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”…
…even if “the comfortable” is a former gubernatorial candidate from a party whose asses their various publications kiss with full tongue?
NPR’s Teri Gross – one of the most overpraised figures in the American media, a woman who is to interviewing what Jay Cutler has been as a quarterback – busted out her deep thoughts about history and politics in a recent interview with American Sniper star Bradley Cooper.
“Clint Eastwood directed the film – and very well. He directed it very well, I think,” she said. “But I’ll tell you, after he interviewed the chair at the Republican National Convention, I thought, wow, I’d be scared to work with him after that. And I’m wondering if you had any reservations about, you know, having him direct the film knowing that he could interview the chair.”
Cooper laughed: “You got to ask him about that one time (laughter) if you ever get a chance to.”
But it’s Gross’s deep thoughts about the nature of mankind’s most brutal habit, and the place of morality, that is the real big news (emphasis added):
Gross also sounded strange when she insisted that people on the Left want to oppose the war, but support the troops, but “they draw the line when the troops had to do something like kill someone.”
In other words, they support the military when it’s just like another social program; when it’s thousands of people sitting around collecting checks and not really doing much.
A local lawyer of my acquaintance wants to be a judge in the worst way. He’s applied several times, never got an interview, thinks maybe he needs to network, find someone to put in a good word with the Judicial Selection Committee.
Dude, you’re playing the game under the Old Rules. It’s not gonna work.
You’re a 49-year-old straight White Male, married with two kids, Christian, not a veteran, not handicapped. You get no diversity points; in fact, you’re the guy we’re trying to replace by giving Everybody Else diversity points.
You’re a party-line Democrat but only in the voting booth; you’re not tight with Senators Amy or Al, Mayor Chris or Governor Dayton’s puppeteers so nobody is willing to move your resume to the top of the pile.
A bunch of kids in his children’s school are sick. He’s certain it’s because of those damned right-wing kook anti-vaccine people. Maybe. Or maybe they’re unaccompanied illegal immigrants that Obama caught, released and disbursed all over the country to spread exotic South American diseases throughout a population that’s not inoculated against them. Gee, sorry your kid is sick but it was an entirely foreseeable consequence of a policy adopted for the Greater Social Good. Gotta break a few eggs, you know, and one of them is yours.
He’s also setting aside money in a 529 Educational Savings plan that Obama wants to tax so other people’s kids can go to college free.
See what being a dutiful Liberal gets you? Not a damned thing. In fact, the exact policies he supports For A Better Society are the ones holding him back. He’s like that guy in the Sprint commercial wanting to “stick it to the man” except it turns out, he is The Man. I believe the French expression is: hoist on your own petard.
I keep waiting for the scales to fall from his eyes and a new Conservative to be born. Any day now . . . .
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!
Today on the show, King Banaian and Ed Morrissey will join me for the long-awaited “Seventies Music Special” – a jaunt through the absolute worst music of one of the most maligned – justly or not – decades in the history of American popular music.
We will also be talking with Sen. Branden Petersen about the various electronic privacy initiatives in the legislature this year.
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
The jelly beans are on my desk, to greet passersby.
I’ve got a pot of stew in the crock pot, ready for the traditional family dinner, when I tell my kids how unlikely it is they’d have been born but for today’s birthday boy, and why.
It’s time for the official Shot In The Dark holiday. Today would be Ronald Reagan’s 114th birthday.
I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence. His eight years were not perfect, and I don’t beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for twenty years (to say nothing of in their first month of service). His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.
Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century.
But in these difficult times, when a President is promoting fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire, Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed predecessor – something our next president will need even more of in 2016.
And the most important part? He did it by unleashing something that many, then as now, thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit.
Oh, there are those who say “today’s GOP wouldn’t nominate Reagan!” – to which I respond with a contemptuous sign, before telling the critic to listen to “A Time for Choosing”, and tell me who is more resembles; Arne Carlson, or Scott Walker?
Reagan’s gone. But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people. Most of it, anyway.
So Happy Reagan’s Birthday, everyone!
NOTE: While this blog encourages a raucous debate, this post is a hagiography zone. All comments deemed critical of Reagan will be expunged without ceremony. You’ve been warned.
You have the whole rest of the media to play about in; this post is gonna be gloriously one-note.
The rumor spread yesterday that Jordan’s King Abdallah, enraged by the grisly, medieval murder of Jordanian fighter pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh, is personally leading, or even flying, combat missions.
It’s apparently not true, causing at least part of the US media to spring into action against an enemy they hate vastly more than ISIS. And I can’t imagine many air forces that’d be too keen on having a 53 year old fighter pilot (even if he were rated on combat aircraft, which according to several Arabic newspapers, he’s not; he’s an infantryman who is rated in civilian aircraft and unspecified helicopters), to say nothing of their chief executive flying directly into harm’s way. .
On the other hand, after six years of a President who can’t be inveigled to condemn extremist Muslim terrorism today without comparing it to Catholic terror from 700 years ago, who equivocates between all sides in every issue (unless it’s Democrat vs. Republican, naturally), who is like hot air in that he equalizes himself across all available intellectual and moral space, I can see why the idea of a leader who leads, who makes moral judgments and personally drops 2000 pound GPS-guided judgment on the guilty, is so seductive.
All of these women were arrested for the same thing – sex with a minor, varying only slightly in age – so there’s virtually no difference in the objective eyes of the law. And yet some of them got absolutely no prison time, while others were jailed for over 20 years. Do you see any difference in the offenders?
Justice has never been “blind”; there’s a reason lawyers tell their clients to wear suits and get haircuts before trials. And I’d be interested in knowing:
a more complete listing of offenders
the demographics of the judges issuing the sentences
But it does appear as if the sentence for sleeping with a high school boy is being handed down by a college-age guy…
