The usual bobbleheaded suspects on the left were chattering that Justice Antonin Scalia said “racist” things during a case.

They were, as usual, wrong.  But then, it was Harry Reid.  It goes without saying.

Charles C.W. Cooke:

By pushing one of the parties to extend and deepen its arguments Scalia wasn’t revealing himself to be a “racist”; he was revealing that he understands his job. This, alas, is more than can be said for those who have called him names.

Ifwe are to have a functioning justice system, we cannot hold lawyers personally responsible for the unpleasant parts of their designated roles. When a defense attorney successfully demonstrates that the prosecution’s case is too weak for a conviction, he is not betraying a preference for murder or rape or grievous bodily harm, he is ensuring that his client gets a fair shake.

Read the whole thing.

Because when dealing with the chanting points of the silly, low-info left that is very much in the ascendant, forewarned is forearmed.

(LEFTIES:  “Forewarned is forearmed” is a figure of speech, not a threat.  Relax).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy sent me this proposal to fight Islamic terror with unconventional tactics.

What if we armed teachers and others but when the next terrorist attack happens and the terrorists are gunned down, rather than credit the armed citizens, the official narrative given to all media outlets is that Wonder-woman did it?

Why not? If it’s on every channel on TV and also on the internet, it must be true, right? So make her real. Launch a coordinated propaganda effort to show that we have real superheroes in this nation, with super powers and invisible aircraft, etc. Buy airtime for re-runs of the TV show on every channel. Tell the world that she dropped some bombs from super high up to kill the Bad Guys here . . . and she can do it to you over there, too. We aren’t even going to bother sending our Marines, this job doesn’t need real men, we let our women handle piss-ants like you.

Plant talking heads on talk-show panels to debate whether her invisible aircraft is truly invisible or merely stealth. The underlying, unspoken assumption is that obviously Wonder-woman exists and so does her plane, that’s a given, while emphasizing that Wonder-woman’s airplane is undetectable and the question is how. The administration refuses to confirm or deny, of course.

Take the show on the road. Warn the locals in Syria that Wonder-woman is up there in her invisible plane. Leaflet them ahead of time even, warn them the invisible plane will be overhead to kill all terrorists at 11:00. Then dump the bombs on a known target at 11:00. It wouldn’t be that hard to engineer some glider bombs to whisk in sub-sonic, no rockets or other noise.

Worked in WWII. She was a source of pride for us and danger to the enemy. No, maybe Hitler and his high level goons didn’t believe, but the little fish who make things work may have doubts and anything that works to undermine confidence in their side, weakens their support.

Later, we’ll work Captain America into the program.

Joe Doakes

To:  Councilman Dai Thao
From:  Mitch Berg, next year’s “unwelcome” person
Re:  Next project?

Councilman Thao:

In re your proposed resolution barring The Donald for making Muslims feel bad; it looks like you’ve got more work to do.

That is all.

Last Friday, we noted that to the US’s murder rate of 3.8 per 100,000 ranks 121st in the world overall.

Which, to “Gun Safety” advocates, is just wrong; they insist on constraining the comparison to only “western, industrialized” countries – as if the life of a human being in Honduras or South Africa is somehow worth less, or their murder is of less weight than someone from Highland Park.   And I noted that the reasons for the comparison are to make the US look as bad as possible, against small, socially-homogenous countries like Denmark and Norway and Japan.

But I noted that among larger, westernized nations with at least a passing notion of human rights and any kind of social diversity at all, the US still fares pretty well

But then, I thought – what if we factor out the parts of US society that have the major crime problems?  What happens then?

In The City:  First, I thought, we should take a look at America’s cities.

For whatever reason, cities have almost always had a disproportionate murder rate.

So why is that?

Well, that question is one that keeps scads of otherwise unemployable sociologists hard at work.   But it’s no secret that American cities are faced with three pathologies:

• A “War on Drugs” that creates a lucrative black market in which someone with no education can make a stupendous income – provided he or she is willing to defend that income by all means necessary. The estimates of how many murders occur due to the “drug war” vary, but range as high as half.
• An “urban culture” that glorifies violence.
• Decades of social service agencies using the inner cities as “warehouses for the poor”, for bureaucratic and political reasons.  And while there’s little direct causal link between poverty and crime, long-term grinding poverty certainly provides fertile soil for growing crime.

Also, of the top 50 cities in terms of homicide rate – accounting for 11.3% of the population of the US – all but a very vanishing few are Democrat-controlled.  This isn’t so much intended to politicize the issue as to point out that single-party-dominated governments are always less effective at carrying out government’s valid jobs, like law enforcement.

But the fact is, some American cities have downright third-world murder rates:  Saint Louis tops the list in 2014, with almost 50 homicides per 100,000.  Detroit clocks in at 43.5.   We have 25 cities with murder rates above 10/100,000 – triple the national average.

In fact, if you take the ten US cities with the highest murder rates -Saint Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, Baltmore, Newark, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Atlanta, Cincinnati – they add up to about 1% of the entire population of the US – but they account for a solid 10% of all homicides in America.

But let’s go bigger than that.

The fifty American cities with the highest murder rates – from Saint Louis down to Charlotte, NC (5.5/100,000) together accounted for approximately 4.426 murders in 2015 – about 3,000 of them likely with firearms.

The Math:  So when you take the top fifty US cities in terms of murder rate, with their 34,7521.052 people (11.3% of the population), and their approximately 4,530 homicides from the US’s population and total number of murders, and subtract them from the rest of the United states, you get about 284 million people, and a murder rate of just under 2.68 per 100.000 people.  That’s roughly equal to the murder rate in Hungary – it ranks the US at #145 worldwide.

It also means that about 11% of the entire US population commits about 38% of the murders.

But the problems of American urban society aren’t the only ones driving up the United States’ homicide rate.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a problem that dates back to before there were cities, or a United States for that matter.

• Last Friday: Intro
• Today:  The effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.
• Tomorrow:  We’ll look at the murder rate in the Deep South.
• Wednesday:  We’ll see what the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies.

(more…)

Two DFL Senators – Bev Scalze and Barb Goodwin, both women and long-time critics of back-slappin’ boys-club-member-in-good-standing Tom Bakk – are retiring from the Senate:

…For Scalze and others, the problems go beyond the disappointment of passing a budget that looked much different after Bakk and Daudt emerged from days of private negotiations with a deal in hand. It’s how leadership handled the final days of session.

Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, said many budget bills were controlled unilaterally, with little input or outreach to herself and other members. She and Scalze declined to put a number on how many Senate Democrats are upset, saying only to “look at the votes.”

Enough Democrats voted against three of the state’s seven budget bills that they required GOP votes to pass. Seven Democrats voted ‘no’ on three or more.

Take the environment budget, which just 10 Democrats — and 25 Republicans — voted to pass. Scalze said the finished product contained a surprise law change she and other members couldn’t stomach: exempting copper and nickel mines on the Iron Range from the state’s solid waste regulations. Bakk and other Senate DFLers represent swaths of the Iron Range.

“(Bakk) gave up a lot of stuff that other members had worked real hard on while he was getting everything he wanted for the Iron Range,” Goodwin said. “That kind of naked power is really not appreciated.”

Nobody who’s seen Tom Bakk will ever use the term “naked power” casually again…

…but the point is – wow.  It’s like the Dems have a war on women or something.

With a nod to Jonah Goldberg:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another victim of The Death Train.

Joe Doakes

If we save even one life…

Yes, you can get Lutefisk.

And here’s the link to Andy Aplikowski – the endorsed, conservative candidate – running against Jim Abeler (Abelertruth.com) in SD35.

And here’s today’s music playlist ♫

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show: Saint Paul repeals the First Amendment; my challenge to gun grabbing legislators; plus…:

• I’ll be talking with Todd Lewis of the Warrior Retreat
• Also, Andy Aplikowski, running in the GOP primary against Jim Abeler in SD35.

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:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

When you get into a discussion with “Gun Safety” advocates, they usually start by knowingly, solemnly intoning that the US has some variant of “the highest gun murder rate in the developed world”.

In response to which I always ask two questions:

• Why just “western, developed countries?”:  The United States’ murder rate is actually in the bottom 2/3 of the world; with 3.8 murders overall per 100,099 people, we rank #121 in terms of murders overall.   And isn’t murder, murder?  Isn’t the life of a Honduran, or a Venezuelan, or an Indian or Russian, worth exactly the life of an American?   Isn’t their murder just as grave an offense?
• Why just “firearms” murders?:  In the immortal words of Archie Bunker:
  
  Are we to believe that murders committed with guns are more heinous than other murders? That murders with knives, clubs, gasoline or bare hands are somehow of less weight than those using firearms? That’s utterly illogical.

The stated goal of comparing only “western, industrialized” countries, we’re told, would be to “compare apples to apples”.  The real goal is to try to cherrypick results.  Of course the US will have a higher murder rate than Denmark, Sweden or Belgium – all of them are small, socially and culturally homogenous countries.   And of course we’ll have a higher murder rate than, say, Japan – a larger nation, but with a socially homogenous population (that, incidentally, tolerates police powers that’d make the ACLU yak up it’s collective skull).

So the correct response is to really compare apples to apples:  large, socially-diverse societies with at least a pretense of individual rights (and it may be a thin pretense indeed).

There, the US and it’s 3.8/100,000 murder rate (about 2/3 of which are firearm murders) looks pretty good compared to other large, industralized, socially and culturally heterogenous nations and the frictions and stresses they lend to the situation:

• Argentina: 5.5
• Brazil: 25.2
• Russia: 9.0
• South Africa: 31.0
• India:  3.5 (and virtually no civilian gun ownership)

But I got to thinking:  What if we took the next step, and accounted for the effect of social and cultural diversity and history in the US murder rate?

What effect would that have?

We’ll tackle that next week:

• Monday:  We’ll look at the effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.
• Tuesday:  We’ll look at the murder rate in the Deep South.
• Wednesday:  We’ll see what the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies.

I’m not a big Donald Trump fan.

No.  Really .  Not.  A.  Fan.

But I’m reminded of Churchill’s statement about Stalin; he didn’t care for him, but if Satan were Hitler’s enemy, Churchill would at least do lunch with him.

And so the Saint Paul City Council might be responsible for me doing  lunch with The Donald, after they put their own special carve-out in the First Amendment:

The St. Paul City Council will vote Wednesday on a resolution that condemns presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and declares Trump unwelcome within the city limits….[Councilman Dai Thao] acknowledged on Thursday he had not yet touched base with fellow council members on the resolution. “We think it will pass,” he said. “St. Paul has always been welcoming to immigrants.”

But not, apparently, dissent in any form.

Dear Mr. Trump:  While I won’t be voting for you at caucuses, I beg of you; please, please, please come to Saint Paul (aka “Chicago on the Mississippi”).  Call these morons on their bluff.

It’d be the show of the century.

It’s another big win for urban liberal privilege.

Steven Colbert built a career playing a broad “Major Bloodnock”-style caricature of a conservative, designed to make liberals titter knowingly (if, usually, autonomically; Colbert may have been, if possible, even more an innovation of “duckspeak” than his benefactor, Jon Stewart.

Now that he’s gotta be himself and win and audience?

What’s that smell?  Yep – the stench of death.

Heh.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

What the world needs now, is tin pot mayors and local dept heads to flit off to Paris, to save the environment by telling everyone else to stop using fuel to flit about. And to agitate for more outdoor refrigerated hockey rinks so no child ever needs to know the tragedy of soft ice in a January thaw.

Idiots. Has all the class and sense of a local ordinance to condemn war in the holy land, or to admonish the Boko Harem kidnappers, or other sweeping consequential mouthings of liberal platitudes.

Check out the list of dept heads, bike czars, you name it. Anyone with a government expense account is getting in on this one. Exhibit director at the Science Museum? I suppose that makes them the anointed climate expert? What with having created from plaster of paris and scraps of cloth an exhibit that is every bit as scientifically sound as the so-called consensus evidence.

Also – look who’s paying for it. Some do-gooder group. Which is funded by tax dollars. Which are contributed by cities, run by the politicians who are getting a free vacation in Paris. Money-laundering their graft and pretending it’s noble effort to save the planet. They never hold these conferences in Darfur or Mogadishu.

joe doakes

If this were the private sector, the regulatory authorities would squat on it like a rhinoceros with diarrhea.

Someone in my social circle tried to compare Bernie Sanders with Ronald Reagan.

I thought about responding.

But let’s be honest.  Nobody says it better than Aretha:

They’re back.  In the wake of the shooting at the abortion mill in Colorado Springs, and the shooting in Minneapolis (and to a lesser extent last week’s shootings in San Bernardino, which the left tried its level best to jam into the template), the talking heads of the left are furrowing their brows and warning us, yet again, about the imminent danger of “white christian right-wing terror”, which, we’re warned, is a huge danger, and could become the biggest most dangerous terror out there.  Says someone in the government. Because science.

It’s BS, of course; while white “conservative” terror was a real thing during the heyday of the Klan, by the seventies it had largely faded to obscurity; today, the Klan and other white/”Christian” identity movements are a pimple on society’s tush.

Indeed, the numbers aren’t even arguable; left-wing environmental groups committed more terror attacks than all other sources combined from 2001-2011; while 9/11 outstripped them all in terms of dead people, the level of effort was lopsided in favor of the left.

And yet the left – from Janet Napolitano to MPR’s Bob Collins down to the dimmest writer at Minnesota Progressive Project, assures us that white terror is the real danger.  

David French points out the absurdity of the left’s claim, against a backdrop of steadily diminishing domestic terror of all kinds:

Don’t tell the alarmists that, though. Even before this weekend’s shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, left-wing sites trumpeted the threat of “Christian terrorists” while minimizing the threat of jihadists. This summer, the New York Times hyped a transparently idiotic study claiming that (mainly right-wing) homegrown extremists were deadlier than jihadists — by excluding from the death toll the almost 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 and the nearly 7,000 Americans killed — not to mention the more than 52,000 Americans wounded — at the hands of radical Islamists overseas. SHARE ARTICLE ON FACEBOOKSHARE TWEET ARTICLETWEETSince the Planned Parenthood shooting, leftists have indicted the pro-life movement itself for the actions of a bitter and angry loner with no known connections to any activist organization. The Huffington Post wrote a story noting that Colorado Springs is full of — gasp! — Christians. Buzzfeed published a comprehensive report demonstrating exactly how abortion-rights activists intend to turn the Colorado shooting into a “rallying cry.”

What it is, is Berg’s Seventh Law in full effect.

A long-time friend of this blog writes:

I do have sympathy for the BLM grievances, truly.  But their goals are very undefined, nebulous, etc.  It’s sad.  It is a tragedy about the young man killed by the police.  I don’t know the facts but it is still a tragedy for all who are involved.
I purposefully walked through the tunnel from the HennCo Govt Center to Mpls City Hall this morning.  There is no evidence of the large protest there yesterday.  The graffiti on Wings Financial was not in evidence.  The main lobby of City Hall did not look worse for wear.  I am pleased for the protesters not doing permanent damage to get their point across, that was very good of them.  The clean up crews also did a good job.

That same night [an acquaintance], a white, middle-aged woman left our building unaccompanied as usual.  The bulding is very near City Hall.  Some man leaving the protest walked up to her and started screaming “BLACK LIVES MATTER, BLACK LIVES MATTER!”  She is a very experienced urbanite and just ignored him but he followed her screaming some more.  She was not particularly frightened by the whole incident, felt a bit threatened and will be sure to pay attention to more  “protests” in order to plan her route to evade them.  The moral of this story is that all the BLM energy simply made a person who might be sympathetic to their cause into a person who sees them as complete idiots to be avoided.
The BLM group though reminds me of the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”  I mean they go to protest at Elsie’s in NE Mpls (a fine place) because they heard a “police” function was happening there.  But lo and behold it was a holiday fundraiser for HennCo Sheriff Stanek (I had an invite but was unable to attend).  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Plus the even was over by the time they got there.  Wrong event, wrong time.  This is BLM’s problem.  They have some legitimate gripes.  They have a totally ineffective response.

And here’s the real radical idea (emphasis added):

Maybe they should do something REALLY radical and start showing up, putting forth candidates, and finding support at the REPUBLICAN caucuses!  Guaranteed, they will very quickly find real meaningful results coming their way.  Either the Dems will get so scared, they will actually start doing something or they will find a very welcoming group at the GOP who will also be falling over backwards to assist.
Just a thought.

That would, of course, shake things up.  A lot.

Of course, it won’t be BLM pushing that.  Black Lives matter is funded by liberals with deep pockets, almost entirely with a goal of trying to keep the African American vote jazzed up during a Democrat campaign season where the black voter will be asked to choose among a bunch of geriatric white people.

Qua BLM, it may not be working – but then that’s not the point.

Lately, the academic left has been hotly engaged in an Orwellian airbrushing of history – trying to cut the legs out from under great figures in history, based on a modern reading of their deeds, beliefs, ethics and morality.

Thus, Abraham Lincoln was a racist first _{and a bunch of other stuff way, way down the list}  

…provided they’re white and American, naturally; Gandhi’s racism and anti-semitism and Che Guevara’s sexism, racism and homophobia don’t rise to the level of retroactionable.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course; I remember having this argument with the PC warriors nearly thirty years ago; “I’d be interesting to see how people 100 years from how judge us”, I’d howl into the void.

Victor Davis Hanson says it better, naturally.  Here’s the conclusion…:

On campus, violations of the Bill of Rights, obsessions with race rather than character, inflated and puerile self-regard, adolescent self-indulgence and materialism, along with epidemic factual ignorance, inability to speak and write coherently, and the loss of inductive reasoning may ensure that the early 21st century will be judged as an era of anti-Enlightenment ignorance — with the twist that never have such pampered people so little deserved all that they inherited.

…but read the whole thing anyway.

Kevin Williamson on the Democrats’ contempt for the rule of law, to say nothing of the First and Second Amendment:

If the Democrats want to do away with the Second Amendment, let them begin the amendment process and see how far they get. We should challenge them to do so at every opportunity.

In reality, the Democrats have declared war on the First Amendment, voting in the Senate to repeal it; they have declared war on the Second Amendment at every turn; they also have declared war on due process and, in doing so, on the idea of the rule of law itself, beginning with the notion of “innocent until proven guilty.” That isn’t liberalism — it’s totalitarianism.

That’s a winnable fight, and we should welcome it.

I’m just going to shut up and urge you to read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Then:

WORLD’S OIL WILL RUN OUT IN TEN YEARS The latest measurements confirm that the world’s oil and natural gas supplies are running out too fast. At some time between 2010 and 2020 the world’s supply of oil and gas will fall below the level required to meet international demand. The US government is aware that we are about to endure a disastrous international energy shortage. According to Dr James McKenzie, a senior member of the climate change programme at the World Resources Institute in Washington, USA: “That’s why we went to war in Iraq.”

Now:

 

“It is better to choke back than to sell into this market,” Henderson said.
“There is just too much gas,” said Kastner. “I expect to see a downturn for the next two years.”

Joe Doakes

And yet Paul Ehrlich isn’t earning a living scrubbing pans in an Olive Garden.

Thanks, all you “I F*****ng Love Science”-reading hamsters on the left!

I had not heard this story – of a group of 1,000-odd American POWs who, at the behest of a quick-thinking master sergeant, all called themselves Jewish to protect the Jewish GIs among them.

The master sergeant – Roddie Edmonds, of Knoxville, who passed away thirty years ago – is now the fifth American to be inducted into the “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial:

At the time of Edmonds’s capture, the most infamous Nazi death camps were no longer fully operational, so Jewish American POWs were instead sent to slave labor camps where their chances of survival were low. US soldiers had been warned that Jewish fighters among them would be in danger if captured and were told to destroy dog tags or any other evidence identifying them as Jewish.

So when the German camp commander, speaking in English, ordered the Jews to identify themselves, Edmonds knew what was at stake.

Turning to the rest of the POWs, he said: “We are not doing that, we are all falling out,” recalled [MSGT Edmonds’ son] Chris Edmonds, who is currently in Israel participating in a seminar for Christian leaders at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies.

With all the camp’s inmates defiantly standing in front of their barracks, the German commander turned to Edmonds and said: “They cannot all be Jews.” To which Edmonds replied: “We are all Jews here.”

Then the Nazi officer pressed his pistol to Edmonds head and offered him one last chance. Edmonds merely gave him his name, rank and serial number as required by the Geneva Conventions.

“And then my dad said: ‘If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,’” recalled Chris Edmonds, who estimates his father’s actions saved the lives of more than 200 Jewish-American soldiers.

Edmonds survived – although by the end of the war, with the food shortages in Germany, life in POW camps was better than concentration camps only by dint of the assurance that the Germans weren’t supposed to kill the inmates.

From Bob Collins’ “Newscut” blog at MPR, in a story about the congressional donnybrook over extending healthcare benefits to first responders and construction workers from Ground Zero:

With that brick, Jon Stewart showed again last night why his retirement has created such a vacuum of moral authority in the national dialogue.

Doesn’t that tell us so much about why this country is in the state it’s in?

One side gets (and, with deep imperfections, practices) its “moral authority” from a long train of the best of human thought, tracing back from Friedman and Hayek and John Paul II, back through the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man, all the way back to the Ten Commandments.

The other?  From standup comic on a TV show conceived as the “progressive” establishment’s answer to conservative talk radio hegemony, featuring a talented standup comic with a gift for snarky faces.

Jonah Goldberg:

I caught some of Morning Joe from my hotel room before I left for the airport. The caption for one discussion was “Were They Radicalized?” I keep seeing stories asking this question as if it’s some great mystery we may never get to the bottom of. The media and the Democratic party are working very, very, hard to pound the wet clay of San Bernardino into a story about runaway gun violence in America.

Just curious: What discrete piece of info are we waiting for to get a definitive answer to that question? Because I thought it might be the thousands of rounds of ammo, the remote-control-car-bombs, the decision to abandon their six-month-old daughter, the contacts with terror suspects and, oh yeah, the murder of 14 people. But hey, that’s just me.

I used to think PJ O’Rourke was being hyperbolic when he said J-school students were the ones too dumb to get into Education.

Muggeridge’s Law is in full effect, obviously.

Still, amid the japing about our dimbulb journalistic “elite”, there’s a serious issue.  The people are being actively disinformed:

Right now the media and the Democratic party are working very, very, hard to pound the wet clay of San Bernardino into a story about runaway gun violence in America. Bogus stats about there being a mass shooting on average once a day streak across the media firmament like so much St. Elmo’s Fire. The fact that gun violence has been in a decades-long decline doesn’t count for much. Poor Charlie Cooke is running around like the last artillery officer on a 19th-century British warship, trying to return fire from each cannon station.

Cook is doing his usual great job.  But he’s far from alone on the, er, gun deck.

The World’s Most Elite Newspaper, Last Year:  “Terror watch lists are arbitrary, opaque, authoritarian and unconstitutional“.

The World’s Most Elite Newspaper, Today: “Except for people who want to buy guns”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This sounds like someone was trying for The Onion but can’t write well enough to make the cut.  Seriously, signing it “The Movement,” who writes like that?

Joe Doakes

Does anyone but me remember when Muggeridge’s Law seemed, ironically, funny?

In 1994, in a church parking lot off of Sixth and Arcade on the East Side of St. Paul, Guy Harvey Baker, a deranged Gulf War veteran, shot and killed a Saint Paul police officer – Ron Ryan Jr.

Baker then drove towards a woman, standing in the door of the nearby apartment building across the parking lot, to eliminate the only eyewitness.

A man in an apartment building across the street, Lyle Granlund, who happened to be an expert marksman – and had a loaded handgun at hand – considered shooting the murderer.  But then, he reconsidered – thinking that Tom Foley, the Ramsey County attorney and Wahhabi DFLer – would likely prosecute him with just as much zeal as he would the cop killer.

So instead, Granlund shot to mark the car – putting rounds through the back windshield, lodging them quite intentionally in the dashboard and glove box, saving a round in case Baker came after him next.  Baker took off, to be found later that day (via the broken back window), leading to a further shoot out that killed another St. Paul policeman, Officer Tim Jones, as well as his dog Laser.  Had Granlund not feared prosecution (quite legitimately – Foley did, in fact, try to prosecute him, and stopped only when the St. Paul police refused to cooperate), Baker would have ended his spree in that parking lot, with one dead, and Officer Jones would have lived to serve another day.

Political correctness killed a police officer.

And it’s tragic to see that we have learned absolutely nothing from the event. It’s entirely likely that 14 people are dead in San Bernardino because people fear politically correctness-induced repercussions is on the part of the authorities more than they do criminals.