You’re soaking in it.

Charlie Martin on the mainstream fake-news media’s ongoing narrative campaign.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Ivanka went on a date while Liberals were busy protesting in airports.  How dare she?  She should be wearing sack cloth and ashes to atone for the sins of the man who was elected to do what he is doing.

Two thoughts: first, what happened to the “Leave the Children Out of It” policy regarding Presidential offspring?  She’s not the President, she’s not out there making stump speeches for him, she’s not responsible for what he says or does.  Leave her out of it.

 Second, the reaction is quite a contrast to the total silence when The Light Bringer was golfing, or beaching, or just lazing about watching the playoffs as soldiers got killed or ambassadors dragged through the streets.  Almost as if there’s some sort of, I dunno, maybe a double standard?

 Joe Doakes

I’m pretty convinced that:

1. The Democrats’ current messaging strategy is “just say whatever we need to, because gullible peoples’ votes count as much as anyone’s.  Consistency, logic and ethics are for those square-state rubes”.
2. The big media are just fine with that, and playing along with enthusiasm.

“Play stupid games, get stupid prizes”.

It’s a mantra my first carry permit instructor, the late Joel Rosenberg, used to drill into his students’ heads.  The point?  The best case of self-defense is the one you don’t need to state in front of a court.  Don’t put on your legal gun and go to roughneck bars, or hang out where stupidity is likely to break out.   If someone provokes you, walk away – using extreme measures.  “When you’re armed”, Joel used to say, “it’s incumbent on you to be the biggest pussy in the bar”.

And the stupidity doesn’t start when the potential violence does.  Oh, no.

One of the things police and prosecutors would do, if you got into a lethal-force self-defense incident, was pore over everything they can find about your past, to find some way in which they can convince a jury that it wasn’t really self-defense.

Remember – under Minnesota law, there are four factors that must be upheld when you claim self-defense using lethal force:

1. You must not be a willing participant:  you can’t start a brawl, and then shoot someone who breaks a bottle.
2. You must reasonably, immediately fear death or great bodily harm.  Reasonable means “it’ll convince a jury”.  Immediate means now; if someone says “I’m gonna kill you…tomorrow”, you can’t kill them first.
3. You must use appropriate force.  In other words, you can only use the force needed to end the threat.  No more.
4. You must make a reasonable effort to retreat.  Reasonable.  If you’re pushing your baby in a stroller, you don’t need to leave it behind.  If you’re a 70 year old man with a knee replacement attacked by four youths, you don’t need to try to out run them.  And in Minnesota, it doesn’t apply in your house.  In “Stand Your Ground” states, this provision is disregarded.  Minnesota is not a Stand Your Ground state.

When you claim “self defense”, you must meet all four of the criteria above.  That means all four; if you miss one of them – or if a jury can be convinced you missed one of them, rightly or wrongly – you’re in big trouble.

Big Trouble:  Allen Scarsella was convicted of “Riot”, First Degree Assault and some counts of Second Degree Assault for an episode that happened at the protests outside the Minneapolis Fourth Precinct in November 2015.

The jury deliberated for seven hours following two weeks of testimony from nearly two dozen witnesses — including surprise testimony from Scarsella and a co-defendant — before returning guilty verdicts on all counts.

So – how did Scarsella get convicted?

Let’s go through those four elements.

Fear Of Death:   Observers, and even some of the victims, testified that there was a chase, as at least seven protesters ran after Scarsella and his companions.  Was fear of death or great bodily harm reasonable?  We’d have to ask the jurors – but the law doesn’t require one to be a mind-reader.

 Mobs do stupid things.  Call this a definite maybe.  It would certainly be obtuse to rule it out just because you don’t like the defendant or his motivations; people who believe objectionable things have rights, too.

Convincing a jury of this sort of thing is why defense attorneys make the big bucks.

Duty To Retreat:  Well, no doubt there.  Scarsella and his friends certainly tried to get away.   Call this a no-brainer for the defense.

Was Lethal Force Appropriate?:  Well, assuming it was reasonable to assume the threat was immediate and lethal, the shooting ended the threat.  As far as that goes, let’s call it a non-factor.

Not A Willing Participant:  Here’s the thing about jury trials (or so I’m told by my lawyer friends); a big part of the job is making sure the jury likes you, feels for you, identifies with you.  This becomes important when it comes to this criterion of self-defense in particular.

Going where a confrontation might happen might be considered “willing participation” – but in the Darren Evanovich shooting, where a Good Samaritan chased an armed robber into an alley, the prosecutor decided the evidence showed the Samaritan was not a willing participant; he went looking for the purse, not a fight.

But while Scarsella may well have had second thoughts about attending the protest long before the shooting started, the prosecutors also found some evidence that made him pretty  unsympathetic to the jury:

They watched several videos taken before and after the shooting, including ones of Scarsella making racist comments; and they viewed numerous texts where Scarsella described his intent to kill black people.

Now, could a good lawyer have gotten a jury to disregard this?  Maybe, maybe not.    Even racists have the right to defend their lives; self-defense isn’t a popularity contest.

But jury trials, to a great extent, are.  And the prosecution (according to sources familiar with the case) were able to create an impression with the jury that Scarsella went to the Fourth Precinct looking for a fight.  Which blew away his chance of calling himself an “unwilling participant”, and with it, his self-defense claim.

The obvious lesson – if you value the right to self-defense, and you believe things that a jury might find unsavory, then keep quiet about them, especially on social media, text messages and other searchable media.

And it’s not just racial ugliness.  If you’re a shooter, for crying out loud, don’t be jabbering on Facebook about how eager you are to turn your new shotgun on an intruder.  It’l make it harder for a zealous prosecutor to paint you as a slavering gun nut with an itchy trigger finger.

Another obvious point – the Good Samaritan in the Evanovich case, as well as the Broadbent shooting in 2015, involved citizens who followed the rules; after shooting, they called the police and tried their best to render first aid.  Scarsella fled the scene and didn’t call the police and was caught sometime the next day – a bad tactic if you want to claim self-defense.  It’s good to be a responsible citizen.

Like every self-defense shooting, the Scarsella case should be a sobering reminder – in this case, of what not to do.

I was going to start this post out with a wry quip about the irony of people protesting a president they say will oppress people, actually oppressing people.

I’m talking about the riots in – where else? – Berkeley last night.

There, children of the wealthiest society in the history of the world, protesting others’ “privilege” by shutting down a speech (by “provocateur” Milo Yiannopolous – that caused them cognitive dissonance.

Of course, as PJ O’Rourke said, “life is full of irony – if you’re stupid”.

Then it occurred to me – this is far from an original thing.   It’s not new for political movements to have “direct action” wings, designed to radicalize the the “debate” and, eventually, the opposition.

The easy parallel is the “Brownshirts” – “Sturmabteilung” – the “direct action” wing of the Nazi Party from the early twenties through the end of World War 2:

“Community Organizing”. “Brownshirts” in action.

One of their primary missions – shut down political events by the Nazis’ opposition.

Of course, given this description…:

The protest turned violent around 6 p.m. when dozens of masked anarchists, dressed in black and wearing backpacks, emerged from the otherwise peaceful crowd.

…a better simile might be Mussolini’s “Camicii Neri” – Blackshirts – who filled the same purpose in Italy…

“Protersters” at Berkeley last night. Oh, I”m kidding. It’s Mussolini and his “Camicii Neri”. Distinction without much difference, really.

…shouting down and beating Communists and Socialists and Monarchists in the streets, turning Italian politics into the full-contact sport that played into the hands of radicals on the left and left.

Darn you, Trump.

Just you watch.

Liberals over the past 2 decades introduced campaign finance “reforms” intended to control the pace, funding and content of political speech.  Conservatives warned them.  They didn’t listen.

Donald Trump turns those laws to his advantage.  Watch the left bleat about censorship.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Lately, I’ve been watching the reboot of “Hawaii 5-0” on Netflix.  Started out as a typical cop show with the usual shoot-outs and chase scenes, but the real value of the show was the scenery.  No, not island volcanoes and surfboards; every dialogue scene featured the main characters standing on the beach talking in the foreground while bikini-clad hotties paraded behind them.  After a while, it became amusing – apparently the beaches in Hawaii have nothing but hotties.  Where are the pasty beach whales from Minnesota, desperate to get their 5-day tan before the vacation ends?

 Now that I’m into Season 3, the scenery has changed.  Lots of flying over rain forests and aerial views of high-rise hotels, nowhere near as much background beach action.  And the storyline has changed, too, not as many chase-them-until-you-shoot-them action scenes, more trouble-with-her-boyfriend and who-will-get-custody drama.  I started out watching Starsky and Hutch but now I’m watching General Hospital.

 I suspect it’s a deliberate shift away from Guy Show over to Chick Flick.  They’ve ruined it.  I’m done watching before they go full Law and Order, preaching the blessings of gun control, the evil of Christianity and the absolute necessity of whatever ‘right’ is the fad today.

Joe Doakes

I suspect a writers room full of people who want to write Something Meaningful.  With predictable results.

If Donald Trump never does another single good thing in office, or if he falls down an elevator shaft tomorrow (heaven forfend), he will have accomplished the one solitary hope I, and a lot of conservatives, had for a Trump adminsitration:  appointed a worthy successor to Antonin Scalia. in Neil Gorsuch:

As Gorsuch put it (in Cordova v. City of Albuquerque), the Constitution “isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams . . . , but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning” (emphasis added). In his one foray as a National Review Online contributor, in 2005 (before he took the bench), Gorsuch lamented that “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”

Music to my ears.

Senate Republicans:  Screw this up at your peril.

Who else thinks Gorsuch is a good, “mainstream” choice?  This conservative talking head.

Criminal-safety groups like to jabber on about having a “conversation about guns”.

Here’s “Protect” Minnesota’s version of “conversation”.

What a bunch of gutless frauds.

Look, don’t get me wrong – it’s not like any criminal-safety advocates can hold their own in a conversation, much less any kind of informed debate with the good guys.

It’s just…

…well, no.  That kinda sums it up.

…only the state of Minnesota could figure out a way to lose money selling drugs.

But they pulled it off:

The state’s manufacturers combined to lose more than $5 million in the first year of legal medical marijuana sales in 2015. And patient count hasn’t met projections, exacerbating high prescription costs for patients that the two companies who cultivate and sell medication have only recently begun to address with modest price decreases.

The Office of Medical Cannabis’ request for more than $500,000 over the next two years is just a fraction of the $40 billion-plus budget Minnesota’s Legislature will assemble this year.

But state regulators say that money is critical to cover the higher-than-expected costs for maintenance of their around-the-clock patient registry and the costs of performing 120 inspections or more each year.

Of course it does.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senior Secret Service agent doesn’t like Trump, says he’s a disaster for the country, wouldn’t take a bullet for him.

 So?  Plenty of other work for Secret Service agents.  Anti-counterfeiting investigations in Alaska.  Running down people in Alabama who make on-line threats against the President.  She’s the special agent in charge of the Denver district so she coordinates advance teams when the President comes to town – that experience would be particularly valuable in case he decides to visit Iceland . . . maybe she spends the next couple of years checking sight lines and roof tops over there?

 This is the Deep State, bureaucrats who are supposed to be neutral and honestly serve the public without regard to who won the election.  But the IRS was happy to go after conservatives, government lawyers readily lie to federal judges, intelligence agencies are leaking obvious propaganda and now this woman decides her oath was personally to The Won, not generally to the job.  

 Drain the swamp. 

 Joe Doakes

It’s time for all those government workers who said they’d quit if Trump won to be held to it.