You will search the Strib in vain for any mention of the fallout from Ilhan Omar’s speech, in which she basically told a Somali audience that she was there to uphold their side’s interests in an ongoing squabble with Ethiopia.

Now, normally you need to go to the London Daily Mail.

So the fact that it’s in the NYPost must mean it’s serious. Tom Emmer called on her to resign:

“Ilhan Omar’s appalling, Somalia-first comments are a slap in the face to the Minnesotans she was elected to serve and a direct violation of her oath of office,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) wrote on X. “She should resign in disgrace.”

If you’re confused by the fracas? It does need some explaining:

Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, appeared to assure her Somali American constituents that she would do everything in her power to prevent the disputed, breakaway Republic of Somaliland from entering into a sea-access deal with landlocked Ethiopia.

A clip of the Minnesota lawmaker went viral with over 2.6 million views after it was posted on X, with a translation saying Omar had said: “As Somalis, one day we will go after our missing territories.”

The congresswoman claims her remarks were lost in translation. 

“It’s not only slanted but completely off,” Omar said of the subtitles in a video of her speech shared by Republic of Somaliland Foreign Minister Rhoda Elmi. “But I wouldn’t expect more from these propagandists.”

Of course, as we noted yesterday, the Somali deputy foreign minister – presumably a Somali speaker – felt the need to disavow the speech in no uncertain terms:

My fearless prediction: Omar will do her usual on-air slumber party with Esme Murphy this Sunday. They’ll paint each others toenails on the air as they commiserate about all the bigotry that strong powerful women face in the world today.

And then it’ll get disappeared.

…while it’s always the Democrats who fantasize [1] about turning the military loose on Americans…:

…it’s the Republicans who are really the “Fascists”.

Representative Wu went on to bleat…:

That’s right – a guy who openly fantasizes about shooting missiles at Americans is concerned about “dangers to his community”.

Gene Wu may be the modern Democrat party’s intellectual thought leader.

[1] One suspects “arousal” to the level of, uh, showing physical symptoms, at least in Mr. Wu’s case.

The Strib ran this story:

Fact-Check: Governors Flanagan and Klink tell us that Minnesota’s…er, “One Minnesota’s” economy has never been better.

And Brandonomics, we are constantly told, is breaking records.

So, clearly, the myth is busted.

Listen to this clip of a speech from Ilhan Omar.

No, seriously.

But when you read the translation of this speech, in your mind, translate it into German, or at least repeat the words in iyour mind, or out loud, in a German accent.

Tell the truth – doesn’t it sound like a clip from Trumph of the Will?

No, not the bit about representing Somalis in America; in politics, you dance with the ones that brung you.

And no, I don’t care that she’s talking Somali. She’s talking to a Somali audience. Latino Republicans talk Spanish at rallies. Back when there were German and Norwegian speaking towns, politicians spoke those languages. I don’t care.

No, it’s just that you can all but hear he say “Blut und Boden” if you listen just right.

“Heeeeeey, you conservatives are pouncing!”

Conservatives…like the Somali deputy foreign minister?

We are pouncing.

God knows the Strib won’t.

“Art” as humanity used to know it is pretty much dead, at least in any community of people who call themselves “artists” anymore.

This was from a, for lack of a better term, “art event” in Powderhorn Park over the weekend:

Ignore the stupid sled.

Look, rather, at the audience. What do you see?

Inevitably, they are smug, corn-fed, entitled, white progressive members of the laptop class and the non-profit/industrial complex – no doubt from “Urban Life” theme parks like Marcy Holmes or Merriam Park, larping it up as “art fans” in Powderhorn, the part of Minneapolis that smug progressives go to when they want to be “down with the neighborhood” (before they scamper back home to where all the barristas and short order brunch technicians have to commute to from Fridley and Brooklyn Center).

The MPD has condemned the display – which, I’m sure, is causing all sorts of nasal snorking over lattes this morning.

And why not? It’s not their stores being cleaned out (none of them as any concept of the free market more involved than a coffee shop), not their cars being jacked (does anyone actually steal electric cars?), not them waking up to bullet holes in their siding.

Here’s hoping every last one of these cretins needs a cop sometime soon.

Who knows? Sometimes even Progressives can learn something.

To: The Secret Service
From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re: SOPs

Secret Service,

Am I remembering wrong, or wasn;t there a time when “threatening a current or former President” was worth investigating, if not actually chargable?

Just curious – Rick Wilson, NPR’s sole GOP source and former head of an organization that had a bit of a “predators in leadership” issue, was on Twitter the other day:

Call me naive and old fashioned, but this kind of thing seems like your turf.

That is all.

Today’s music:

How much effort does today’s #MNDFL put into acting like a bunch of 25 year old “influencers”?

This much.

President Biden came to Duluth/Superior yesterday to celebrate breaking ground on a taxpayer-to-political class money transfer machine.

And the DFL showed him where he stands, figuratively and literally:

What just happened?

Either:

• The Babylon Bee has developed Artificial Intelligence video to the point where they can make a video mocking the President and the gathered, uh, dignitaries, or…
• Governor Klink and Senators DeVille, Baldwin and Slugger made the President stand with his thumb up his butt while they took the inevitable slew of selfies to gurgitate out onto social media.

I love how the even President Biden, around :30, puts up his hands so as to say “What TF? Aren’t I the President?” as DeVille, Slugger and Baldwin cackle like a bunch of Edina housewives chugging box wine.

Hilarious? Yes.

A perfect representation of today’s MNDFL – the obsession with self-adulatory echo-chambering, the forced junior-high giggling, the obliviousness to anyone and anything outside their special little world? The three of them, and Baldwin, act like a clacque of spoiled, oblivious middle-school mean girls.

This does, in fact, personify today’s DFL to a perfect “T”

Joe Biden is spry and capable and not senile and utterly in charge of things and not a semi-mobile meat puppet:

And don’t you dare say otherwise.

Old and Busted: “The rising tide raises all boats”

New Flava: “Decline and stagnation is not just good – it’s courageous“

SCENE 1: It is Constantinople, 1453. The Ottoman forces under SULEIMAN THE GREAT have breached the inner wall of defenses, on their way toward changing the city’s name to Istanbul. SULEIMAN and GENERAL KARAKÜL are standing in the breach, as troops stream past, on their way to loot, rape and pillage.

KARAKÜL: “Go forth and seize what you will, and burn the rest, for you have earned it!

SULEIMAN: (Looking at a sign, in Greek, just inside the wall). Uh, just a moment. The sign says “No raping, looting, pillaging or burning”.

KARAKÜL: Ooops. Good catch, your excellency. (Yelling to troops) Check that. No looting, raping or pillaging!

SCENE 2: Nürnberg, Germany, 1934. The leaders of the recently-empaneled German “Emergency Cabinet” led by Adolf HITLER, are walking from a meeting to a small vegetarian cafe for lunch, discussing their plans now that they’ve achieved complete control of Germany.

HITLER: So, we’ve agreed. The campaign for Lebensraum and the final solution to the “Jewish Problem” must proceed in parallel…”

RUDOLPH HESS: Uh, Mein Führer, before we go too far on that, check that out.

(HESS points at a multicolored sign on the wall next to the cafe.

HITLER: “In this haus, we believe that science is real, that nobody is illegal, that Jews are Human…”

MARTIN BORMAN: D’oh.

HITLER: That changes everything. Maybe we should just work something about with the Poles about Danzig…

SCENE 3: Minneapolis. It’s 1AM on a Saturday morning. Inge SVENSSON and Guiseppe MORELLI, two young hoodlums with arms laden with bottles of cheap vodka and drug syringes, are walking onto the Green Line platform at Stadium Village.

MORELLI: Damn. I need a fix.

SVENSSON: Me too. And I feel like groping some chick.

MORELLI: Groping, my a**. I need to get some.

(A Green Line train with few passengers pulls up to the stop)

SVENSSON: I like how you think my good man. But first, I gotta take a dump.

MORELLI: Don’t be a pig and do it here. Do it on the train. And hurry – my back teeth are floating. Also, I gotta get high.

SVENSSON: Oh, s**t. Wait. Read this:

(Both men scrutinize the sign).

MORELLI: No pooping, peeing, drinking or drug use?

SVENSSON: Dammit. Now we gotta find a restaurant.

MORELLI: The Metro cares about that stuff now? Who knew?

And SCENE

OK, so something useful, non-toxic and non-authoritarian happened at Davos.

Javier Milei loads his carronades with rhetorical grapeshot and aims them at the decks:

We need one of him here.

When it comes to the turmoil of peoples lives, I try to listen more than talk.

Everyone’s life has innumerable nuances, countless surprises sitting like little booby-traps waiting to blow up anyone’s smug, solipsistic assumptions about the lives of others. I’ve made great sport out of impaling the drooling cretins of the lefty alt-media on some of the untold pitfalls of my own life.

I try not to judge people in whose shoes I’ve not walked. I’m a person of perhaps excessive empathy.

But I read this woman’s story, and I just have to ask…:

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them. The worst part was that it wasn’t remotely his fault; this is probably exactly what I asked him to do when we were 21 and first in love, even if I never said it out loud. To shelter me from the elements; to be caring and broad-shouldered. But now it was like I was always on my tiptoes, trying to see around him. I couldn’t see, but I could imagine. I started imagining other lives. Other homes.

What is it with divorced women and real estate? After the terrible conversation when I told my husband how I felt, and that I didn’t think I could change how I felt, I read Dana Spiotta’s new book, Wayward, about a woman who realizes she wants to leave her marriage only after she impulsively buys a fixer-upper. I read Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, about imagining into existence a home of her own after her children are grown and gone. Meanwhile, I called the real-estate agent who’d sold us our house to tell her that we probably needed to put it back on the market, and she told me all about her own divorce—how long she’d stayed, how hard it was to go, and how she still, decades later, sometimes wondered whether it was the right thing to do. Don’t worry about the house, she said; it’ll sell. This happens all the time.

I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book. Not a book about real estate!

…am I the only one just absolutely consumed with hatred for this vapid, trite, entitled, upper-middle-class dilettante-ette?

After a year and a half, the final report on the Uvalde Massacre was released last week.

And it told us something we knew within about a year of the Columbine Massacre – because the Secret Service reported it, after doing a deep study of spree killers: when someone is engaged in a spree killing (a mass murder with no other motivation), the best response is to meet them with violent opposition. Spree killers almost invariably operate in a psychotic reverie – and violent resistance shatters that fugue state. The directive: Don’t negotiate. Don’t wait for SWAT. Go in – if you’re a cop, do it as soon as you have another cop to cover you. Move in in mutualliy-supporting groups of 2-4 cops, and get rounds on target. If nothing else, violent resistance breaks the fugure state, and usually causes the spree killer to give up or kill themselves. (The Secret Service report didn’t endorse armed civilian resistance – but the real-world record shows a myriad of cases of regular schnooks ending spree killings. It’s the principle, not the actor, that gets the spree killer to point the gun at their own head.

And the Uvalde cops? Like the Parkland cops before them, they didn’t forget all their training…:

Eleven officers from the Uvalde school district and Uvalde Police Department arrived on the scene within three minutes of the shooter’s entry into the school. Five advanced initially and two were hit by shrapnel. Police made three attempts to enter the classrooms, which are adjoined by an interior door.

But as at Parkland, there was apparently crisis in leadership:

Pete Arredondo, then the chief of the Uvalde school police department, “directed officers at several points to delay making entry into classrooms in favor of searching for keys and clearing other classrooms,” the report found. He also tried to negotiate with the shooter, and treated him as a barricaded subject instead of a continuing threat to children and school staff, the report says…”The report concludes that had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” [US Attorney General Merrick ]Garland said.

The only “negotiating tactic” to which spree killers respond is shots on, or near, the target. They are the target.

The LATimes – one of our corrupt activist agenda-whore media’s worst offenders – is taking a weed-whacker to the “news” room.

The other members of the club are squirting tears:

“If you care about journalism…”

You mean, “journalism” like this?

If you care about journalism, bring a **c**n* bulldozer and some gasoline.

My college theatre professor, Pat Lavin, used to talk about one of her jobs when she was an LA theatrical producer and director – which was going in to have a series of rehearsals with long-running shows to “take out the ‘improvements'” that’d crept into the show over months or years of live performances.

Sounds like writers need to come back from the grave and do the same thing.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The Guthrie Theatre keeps sending me begging letters.  Please, please come see a show to support us.   We need the money.

Well, okay, what are you showing?  “Dial M for Murder,” hey, I know that one, it’s a classic.  Wait, what’s this in the description?

“While in London promoting her new murder mystery, Maxine drops in on her former lover Margot who shares some distressing news: She’s being blackmailed for a love letter from Maxine that went missing after their affair ended . . . This clever, fast-paced adaptation adds extra layers to the iconic tale, making the “Will he get away with it?” question even more thrilling.”

I remember “Dial M for Murder.”  There were no lesbians.  I can’t see that this “clever, fast-paced adaption” adds anything worthwhile to the story.  It looks to me like base pandering.  That’s why the Guthrie needs money, because they’re so busy signaling their virtue that nobody wants to see their shows.  They can’t just tell a good story, they must “improve” it by making it a morality tale, by beating their audience over the head with how hip and woke and sensitive they are.  They must bastardize every classic into boring message fiction, even though “boring message fiction is the leading cause of puppy-related sadness” and people really shouldn’t make puppies sad.

Nope, not going.  Which saves me a c-note or more, with dinner and parking, so silver lining.

Joe Doakes, staying home but not in Como Park

I’m all for updated retellings of classics. For example, “Richard III” set in the 1930s was brilliant, because it showed the eternal truths of the original play in a setting – interwar Europe – where those truth were acting in real time within living memory. (Perhaps a version set in the 2020 election would be in order).

So – how is Dial M improved with an extraneous lesbian sub-plot?

I’m open to suggestions.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is leaving a guitar shop on Selby Avenue after dropping off an instrument for some repairs, when MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, steps out of a chi-chi coffee shop.

SILBERMAN: Merg.

BERG: Oh, hey, MyLyssa…

SILBERMAN: Terrible, what’s going on in Gaza.

BERG: Yep. 1,300 Israelis massacred, thousands of Gazan human shields dead, hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed…

SILBERMAN: Dozens of journalists killed in Gaza by Israeli forces. It’s terribly dangerous for journalists.

BERG: er, yeah. I suppose that’s a problem too. But, as in World War II, if you’re where the action is, there are dangers.

SILBERMAN: World War II killed dozens of journalists.

BERG: Right. And between 30 and 50 million other combatants and civilians.

SILBERMAN: And dozens of journalists.

BERG: And during the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which killed thousands, especially black and immigrant New Yorkers…

SILBERMAN: Rioters besieged the New York Times building and killed several journalists.

BERG: When the Titanic sank, it was a tragedy that…

SILBERMAN: …two journalists died.

BERG: But it’s not like they were singled out. I mean, they were on a ship…

SILBERMAN: Aren’t you listening? Journalists died.

BERG: Right. So – Rwanda…

SILBERMAN: Journalists were murdered!

BERG: Hmmm. And during the Minneapolis riots, the biggest outrage was…

SILBERMAN: Journalists getting pepper-sprayed and shot with rubber bullets. And some government officials didn’t respond to our requests for interviews.

BERG: And the destruction of East Lake Street and University Avenue, the Third Precinct, and much of civil order…

SILBERMAN: (Yawns broadly). Sorry. I really have to get to the Society of Professional Journalists meeting

BERG: No doubt.

(And SCENE).

All is not well in China.

This video shows a Miao village (Miao are ethnic cousins of the H’mong) smacking down a group of local Communist Party thugs sent to enforce the party’s burial racket; locals are forced to bury the ashes of the dead in official, party-approved cemeteries, at immense expense.

The locals were having none of it.

This is part of a growing wave of unrest inside Red China, as the gap between “Have Nots” and “Have Lots” grows gapingly wide.

As to the locals beating the crap out of party thugs? It’s the kind of thing one hopes we see in Greater Minnesota the next time Keith Ellison sends his goons to enforce and unconstitutional lockdown…

SCENE: It’s a planning session at Big Left (TM), the central planning organization for leftist, “woke”, “progressive” groups. Avery LIBRELLE, Cat SCAT, Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, Stephanie Marie ANNAN, Edmund DUCHEY, Evan Micah BRYAN, Inge “Lucky” CARROLL are gathered around a conference table.

ANNAN: We need to come up with something around which we can unite people against the racist genocidal colonizers.

LIBRELLE: Walmart?

ANNAN: No, not this time. We’re talking Israel.

CARROLL: Yes. What can we do to focus the attention of the world on the slaughter of innocent people by the white supremacist colonizer Jews…

BRYAN: Zionists

CARROLL: …Zionists?

SCAT: Maybe go to Gaza and demonstrate?

(There is a brief, pregnant pause before the discussion resumes)

BIRKENSTOCK: I’ve got it! Let’s demonstrate in front of a childrens cancer hospital!

CARROLL: Yes! That’ll show the Jews…

BRYAN: Zionists

CARROLL: ..Zionists that we mean business!

ANNAN: I (claps) love (claps) it!

DUCHEY: (perusing cell phone) Oh, no. Look – it’s been done:

CARROLL: Dammit!

ANNAN: OK – but we’re on the right track!

BIRKENSTOCK: OK – maybe we picket a no-kill animal shelter?

ANNAN: I (clap) LOVE (clap) IT!

And SCENE

When I was a kid, I got my first drivers license in North Dakota. The whole process was handled via snail mail between state offices. Took about two weeks.

IN the decades I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve gotten or renewed my license eight times, counting last month.

Three of those times, it took six or more weeks to arrive. Another time, after three months, I went to the newly-computerized DPS, and found that some union data entry droog and entered an address that I had not only never lived at, but didn’t exist (“18xx Minnehaha in MInneapolis”).

And this last month? Six weeks and counting. I went to the DPS office. They said “Production issue”.

3-4 years ago, I got my mother’s drivers license renewed in North Dakota. Printed on the spot. Done while I waited, and I didn’t wait long enough to even notice.

So tell me, DFLers – when Minnesota brags about having “good government”, what are you talking about?

With the change in name from Twitter to “X”, we an in fact call these “X-ioms”:

“A tweet that starts with “hear me out” almost never deserves to be heard, much less heard “out””.

“Arguments that end with “period” or “full stop” should almost always have stopped before they started.”

“When a tweet ends with “that’s the tweet”, a silent “unfortunately” is assumed.”

“Posts beginning “As a [blank] scholar” or “[Blank] scholar here!” only have a high likelihood of being wrong and stupid. They are, however, infallibly guaranteed to be insufferable.” (This one is via @davidpdeavel on X. And it reminds me of a prominent NeverTrumper who tosses “GErman Studies major here…” in front of an amazing number of unrelated subjects).

“Any tweet that start with the words: “With all due respect” will include none.” (Via OldSchoolPhD on X)

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Stores are now locking up underwear to prevent shoplifting.  That’s backwards – we ought to be locking up shoplifters – but assuming Liberals will continue to own the DA’s offices so the sensible option is out, there’s still a better way to prevent shoplifting without forcing all of us to live in the gulag.

When you walk into the store, there are two doors.  The door to the Right will not open without a credit card.  The door to the Left is open all the time. 

Inside the store on the Right, it’s a normal store.  Grab a cart, walk around, browse, touch stuff, load up your cart, scan everything at the checkout which automatically bills it to the credit card you used to get in, take your stuff to your car. 

Inside the store on the Left, there are touch screen kiosks like McDonalds in front of a chest-high counter topped by plexiglas.  Touch the items you want to purchase.  The machine spits out a ticket.  When your number is called, go to the counter and pay the clerk, who gives you a receipt and passes your order through the secure pass-through door (like the Walgreens drive-through drawer, only bigger).  No pay, no merchandise.  

Yes, it would be possible for people on the Right to steal stuff.  You could do that now, at the self-service check-out at Cub.  So the store has employees watching and if you get caught, they charge it to your card and then they ban your card from accessing the store again.  From now on, you pay cash on the Left side like the other thieves.

Advanced options might include curbside pickup for online orders, or home delivery for a small additional fee, you know, the way things are done in an ordinary high-trust First World nation, the way America used to be.  That was nice.  I miss that.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

This – well, the “door to the left” – was exactly how grocery stores worked, until a little over 100 years ago, when the A&P chain invented the shopping cart and accessible shelves. You went to the counter, you told the clerk what you wanted, and you waited while he/she got your stuff and bagged it up.

Of course, we had a high(er) trust society back then.

Peter Schickele – better known to decades of music geeks as the author of the “PDQ Bach” music history saga – has passed away. He was 88.

It occurs to me that calling. him the “Spike Jones of Music Satire” depends on a generation of people who know who Spike Jones was.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”

That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”

“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Maybe the “Weird Al Yankovic of Classical Music”?

The music majors in college were all into PDQ Bach – and I eventually figured out why. He really, really did classical music satire – perhaps the most esoteric form of satire there is short of lampponing ancient Greeks in ancient Greek – really, really well. He not only nailed the punch line – the funny jab – but the setup, the keen understanding of the milieu he was sending up.

This one made me laugh so hard I had a hard time breathing.

Maybe you had to be there. But as I was there, there are no regrets.

One of the things that gave me the odd chuckle was Schickele’s constant North Dakota references. Clearly the guy knew something about the state – but he was a New Yorker.

An accomplished bassoonist, the young Mr. Schickele played in his local symphony, the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, when he was in high school.

Years later, he would pay tribute to his North Dakota roots by bestowing upon himself, in his role as P.D.Q.’s earthly representative, an august academic title: professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (There really is a Hoople, N.D. There really isn’t a University of Southern North Dakota there — or anywhere.)

So I learned something new:

RIP, Peter Schickele. .

Call it coming from a more genteel time, or more reasonable place, or having been raised by a guy, and taught by another, who exalted the virtues of civil engagement, even with people they disagreed with, as well as some of your basic Christian values.

So I feel a little bit bad admitting how much I loved watching this:

If I, personally, am any indication, there are a lot of guys over the age of 40 out there with a lot of thoroughly repressed anger about how this current generation is f***ing up society who’d like to tak a chunk out of some shrieking man-bun.

But again – part of me feels bad to think that.

Part of me.

.

I saw “The Fall of Minneapolis” again last week.

Now, when I first mentioned seeing it a few months back, a few smart people whose opinions I never discount asked “is there anything new that the courts didn’t settle?”

That brings up a couple of questions.

In our society, we usually think that if a court – an impartial jury of our peers, a couple of adversarial attorneys patiently digging out the facts, a fair and impartial judge facilitating it all via “due proces” – decides something, that’s that. The truth has been found.

There’s problems with that.

The was this guy, James Fleming, a Facebook friend, shooter and criminal defense attorney. He used to snap at people who referred to “due process” by itself as a reason to trust something. Paraphrasing: due process isn’t a guarantee of fairness, much less justice. It means the proceedings all check the same checkboxes and standards. The fairness and justice is all in the details.

So – how can that go wrong?

Years ago, I was *very* tangentially involved in the case of a man who’d been accused of a fairly grisly rape and murder in 1982. He had been kind of a lowlife, a petty criminal and drug addict, the kind of guy you’ve seen on a thousand episodes of “Cops” insisting to the officer “I have NO IDEA whose gun and cocaine that is!” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

The courts settled the matter.

A decade and change later, a group of people did enough digging and agitating on his behalf to get the attention of “The Innocence Project”, a group of pro-bono lawyers that works on what they believe to be unjust convictions.

The lawyers found that the original conviction had been secured via:
– A jailhouse snitch with a history of perjury whose testimony nonetheless was allowed
– A District Attorney hiding exculpatory evidence.
– An incompetent public defender.

The exculpatory evidence included forensic evidence that, with modern DNA testing, could have shed some light on who the attacker was. But it vanished as completely as whispering “due process” in the wind.

After years of legal wrangling, the lawyers found the evidence – and with more modern DNA testing, determined that the man, who’d been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” after “due process”, couldn’t have possibly been the murderer. In 2003 he was released, after 21 years on Death Row.

And he’s not alone. In the past 50 years, *185* inmates have been released from Death Row. Not granted new trials. Not commuted to lesser sentences. *Released* from Death Row to the world – because their “convictions beyond a reasonble doubt” were in error, due to perjury, official misconduct, incompetence, and even some honest but terrible mistakes.

So – do I think the answer to “is it true?” is “the courts have spoken?”

Let’s just say I believe in (grudging, conditional) trust but verification. Throw in a heaping dollop of skepticism about the integrity of public officials and systems.

More later this wee4