Joe Doakes from Como Park emails;

Minnesota court says I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in my cell phone records. Local police don’t even need a warrant supported by probable cause, they can fax over a fishing expedition request and the cell phone company rats me out. And if cops can get it, you know private investigators can get it, not to mention politically motivated bureaucrats looking for dirt on political opponents.

Why doesn’t a cell phone provider offer a Secure Option? For just $$$ per month more, all your calls will be encrypted, location and usage data will be scrubbed, there will be nothing for local law enforcement, hackers, hijackers, and even the NSA to snoop on.

Secret doesn’t have to mean illegal. Sensitive contract negotiations for the new quarterback. Corporate merger negotiations. Undercover cops. Political candidates discussing strategy with advance teams. Just plain cranky people who don’t like bureaucrats snooping on them. Sounds like a business opportunity.

Joe Doakes

 Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s current ascendancy, across the US but especially in currently-single-party Minnesota, is the complete control they have of the long-range planning bodies that control the spending of so very, very much money in our society. 

And Katherine Kersten is onto the biggest and baddest such body in Minnesota, and their real aim – to take control of life as we know it in Minnesota.

The goal – from the Obama administration all the way down to the State of Minnesota – is to view metropolitan areas as “Regions”, and plan those regions so as to start funnelling people, by means subtle and brash, from the outskirts back into the cities. 

It’s called Regionalism, and it’s not merely for your and society’s own good; it intends to set things straight:

Regionalism is driven by a core ideological conviction: The cause of the poverty and social dysfunction that bedevil America’s cities is the greed and racial bigotry of suburbanites — especially those in prosperous, outer-ring suburbs, which are viewed as unjustly excluding the poor. Regionalists believe that financial aid for the inner ring won’t remedy this injustice. A profound change in governance is required.

It’s an authoritarian approach to building Utopia.  And like all such attempts throughout history, it requires a villain. 

What sort of change? The title of a book by regionalist guru David Rusk puts it bluntly: “Cities without Suburbs.” In regionalists’ view, suburbs with their own tax bases are, by definition, a menace to cities, and the distinctions between the two must be wiped out as completely as possible.

Regionalists’ strategy to effectively merge cities and suburbs turns on two ideologically freighted buzzwords: “equity” and “sustainability.” “Equity” is code for using public policy to redistribute wealth and to engineer economic equality among demographic groups.

Regionalists view metrowide “economic integration” as one of government’s primary responsibilities. Their plan to accomplish it is twofold: Disperse urban poverty throughout a metro area via low-income housing and make suburban life so inconvenient and expensive that suburbanites are pushed back into the city.

So the suburbs – and suburbanites – are the enemy, the Emanuel Goldsteins against whom the Regionalists will muster their side’s ignorant rage. 

“Sustainability” means policies that would override market forces to ensure that in the future, the great majority of new jobs, economic development and public works projects are funneled into the metro area’s urban core and inner ring — where, not coincidentally, regionalists’ own political base is concentrated. “Sustainable” policies promote high-density, Manhattan-style living, and attempt to wean us away from our cars and push us to walk, bike or use public transit to get to work.

As one critic — speculating on MSP 2040’s likely outcome — lamented: “Do we all have to live in a 1,500-square-foot condo above a coffee shop on a transit line?”

That’d be the goal. 

Of course, if you’re a conservative – at least, a libertarian-conservative – you know that allocating society’s resources via political means, especially to promote political ends, is the least-efficient way to do it.  And it’s Economics 101 to observe that “making people pay more, or less, than they naturally would for a good, or service (or, by extension, government) is the road to wrenching unintended consequences”. 

But that’s the point – making society, or at least the less-favored part of it, pay the bill for utopia:

Suburbanites will disproportionately shoulder the costs of this socially engineered transformation, paying more in taxes and getting less back in infrastructure and public services…Regionalists’ strategy for imposing their agenda hinges on giving regional bodies like the Met Council the ultimate trump: the power of the checkbook. The Obama administration’s “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (SCI) provides a model. SCI channels federal funds for land use, transportation and housing projects through regional bodies. The catch is that, to participate, municipalities must embrace redistributive “equity” goals.

Kersten doesn’t mention – because it’s outside the scope of the piece – that the “unintended consequences” of this sort of gigantistic destruction of the free market toward political goals are always, always vastly worse than planned.  Trying to force people and jobs back into cities at a time when the market is obsoleting the central core city – a concept that never actually occurred in human history outside of the 200-year window of the Industrial Revolution, a period that is drawing to a close even as we speak – is going to cause huge problems. 

Kevin Williamson may have been dead right; it may well be that the faster the Federal government goes broke, the better.  At least it’ll stymie this sort of authoritarian meddling.

Guns save the lives of real Americans.

Story first.  Then a quiz:

It was an extremely scary situation when a female bank teller and her husband were kidnapped from their home and forced to drive to the bank where the wife worked to help the thieves steal money from a safe after hours.
According to KHOU, the couple was at home, when two armed men, who knew the wife was a bank teller, forced their way in and held the couple at gunpoint.

The suspects forced the couple into their own car, made them drive to the bank, and had the wife remove money from the safe.

Afterwards, the robbers told the husband to drive away – in a completely different direction.  To the dreaded “Secondary Crime Scene”, where anyone with a brain knows your odds of survival are in the single digits. 

At some point during that drive, the husband was able to gain access to his personal firearm, which was in the vehicle. 

He opened fire on the suspects, hitting both of them. One of the suspects died of his injuries and the other is in serious condition.

The suspects are described as brothers, aged 20 and 21, who live in the community.

By the way, one of the self-defense questions I get most often is “is there a site that chronicles self-defense cases?”  Clayton Cramer retired his excellent “Armed Self-Defense” site a few years ago – but the site posting this piece, Guns Save Lives, is stepping in to fill the void. 

Now, the quiz.  It’s aimed at all you leftybloggers out there who, in the absence of any knowledge or intellectual curiosity on the subject, labeled the “stand your ground” as “Shoot First” laws. 

The gentleman in this storyshot first.

What do you think would have happend if he’d shot second?

Answers please.

…but getting passed around as much?

Apparently so, since not only – as I pointed out two weeks ago – do minorities benefit disproportionately from “stand your ground” laws, but now we find that a very solid majority supports the laws overall.

The obvious conclusion – most people are smarter than the media.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

•  I’ll be on from 1-3PM.  I’ll be talking with MNGOP gubernatorial candidate Dave Thompson about the evolving 2014 governor’s race.  I’ll also talk with Representative Mary Franson about the status of the battle against the daycare union jamdown.
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. 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 new UStream video and chat channel (don’t ask)
• 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!

First things first:  congratulations to AM1280’s Dennis Miller for chasing AM1130 out of weekday evening radio.  I count that as a big win for AM1280, the little station that could.

Tomorrow on the NARN, it’s going to be a fun show. 

For starters, I’ll be talking with GOP gubernatorial candidate Senator Dave Thompson.  The race is 15 months away – even the convention is still nine months out – and the race is already heating up.  Got questions for Senator Thompson?  Call in!

Then we’ll be talking about the Daycare union jamdown with Representative Mary Franson.  This battle took a small, disappointing turn last weekend – but it’s nowhere near over yet. 

Tune in tomorrow from 1-3PM on AM1280 The Patriot – the station that isn’t moving its programs all over hell and half an acre!

The income gap has gotten worse under Obama. 

Much worse:

In his speech in Illinois last week, and at events since, Obama described income inequality in the starkest terms. “This growing inequality is morally wrong,” he said, and “undermines the very essence of America.”

To be sure, income inequality is a standard trope for liberals, who always use it to advocate more wealth redistribution.

And Obama’s latest focus neatly coincides with his plans to push for more federal spending and taxes on the “rich” in coming budget battles.

But what Obama conveniently leaves out of his sermons is that income inequality has grown faster on his watch than any time in the past two decades, at least.

Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.

The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.

As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama’s recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton’s expansion in the 1990s.

 Who’da thunk it – the party whose entire compaign is aimed at gulling “the 99%” is the one that’s dedicated to screwing “the 99%”.

Couldn’t see that one coming.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A 22-year-old Black man was shot by White police officers. “Community activists” in Minneapolis point out similarities to Trayvon.

Black, White, gun. Yep, sounds the same. News reports say Minneapolis police shot him with Heckler and Koch MP5’s, full-auto 9mm submachine guns. Same thing you’d see a German cop carrying. Here’s a sample photo from another law enforcement agency:

More details here.

Police dog, submachine gun, car chase . . . yep, just exactly like Trayvon. No further analysis needed. Clear case of Black child killed by gun violence. So how do we prevent this tragedy from happening again?

Universal background checks. Mayors Against Illegal Guns were in town Wednesday to read off the names of people killed by gun violence. The sister of the school principal who died in Newtown spoke. A relative of someone who died at Accent Signage spoke. Sensible, reasonable, background checks for all firearms transfers, that’s all it would have taken to prevent every single one of those deaths.

It does strike me as odd that the Minneapolis Police Department doesn’t do background checks on its own officers every time they check a fully-automatic assault weapon out of the firearms locker to go shoot some Black children but no doubt that’s due to Bush tax cuts or the Koch Brothers war on women. We could pay for all background checks by taxing the rich. And we should. For the 22-year-old Children.

Joe Doakes

To the hard left, facts are whatever they say they are.

The London Telegraph lists the world’s most “Libertarian” countries…

…where “libertarian” is apparently defined as “in terms of drugs, gay rights, prostitution and tax policies”. 

Y’know.  The liberties that really matter.

Dear Brit media:  there is more to “liberty” than torching up and waving your private parts around. 

It reminds me of those Americans who are leaping up and down about how “libertarian” Russia is…because they’re giving Snowdon asylum.

This is an update of a piece I wrote five years ago. 

It was 30 years ago today that Big Country’s The Crossing was released.

In America, Big Country has that “one-hit wonder” patina about them, which only goes to show that when it comes to music, too many Americans are ignorant clods.

While The Crossing‘s “In A Big Country” was, indeed, their only real entry into the Top40 in America, it’d be hard to overestimate what a blast of fresh air the album was in 1983.

1983 was a great year in music; it was also the year that provided many of the decade’s musical punch lines; “Putting On The Ritz” by Taco, “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, Kajagoogoo and Culture Club and Asia and Naked Eyes and Laura Branigan and not one but two Jim Steinman bombast-fests (Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” and Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All”) duked it out with some of the great pop music of all time; “Little Red Corvette”, Michael Jackson’s entire Thriller album back before he turned into a walking freak show, and a long list of other classics.

Amid all the good and all the bad, there was a definite trend; it was the era of the synthesizer.  The battle between analog instruments like the guitar, bass, physical drums and mechanical and electromechanical keyboards like the piano and organ on the one hand and purely-electronic ones like the synth and the sequencer had just begun. 

(And if you’ve listened to pop radio lately, you know that the electronics won.  But we’re getting fifteen years ahead of ourselves). 

Some declared the guitar dead.  Articles in Rolling Stone said that the new wave (heh heh) of cheap electronic technology would finally euthanize the venerable analog stringed instrument.  It was the year Yamaha’s revolutionary DX7 synthesizer hit the market, bringing digital Frequency Modulation technology down to around $1,000 for the first time, making it possible for pretty much anyone (with $1,000) to create any sound they wanted, save it onto cassettes (or, for a few bucks more, floppy disks!), play it onto the first inexpensive digital sequencers and MIDI processors and “drum machines” and essentially run a “band” from ones’ keyboard. The future of music, said the wonks, was pasty-faced geeks with hundred dollar haircuts in flamboyant suits, pecking away at keyboards as masses of lobotomized droogs bobbed away in the audience.

Straight into the face of those predictions charged Big Country – a band from Dunfermline, Scotland that mixed technical “wow” with actual fun (the Scottish football-hooligan atmosphere that accompanied their shows and appearances), they blew the knobs and faders off of the synth-wankers that glorious autumn.

The band wrapped itself in “Scotland” – but ironically, none of the band’s members were native Scots.  Bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Brzezicki were from London, guitarist Bruce Watson was Canadian, and guitarist and singer Stuart Adamson was from Manchester (although he grew up in Dunfermline.  His impenetrable brogue was the real thing).

The “wow” came partly from technology (really cheap technology, like the MXR Pitch Transposer and the e-bow, basically a hand-held electromagnet that acts like an electronic violin bow, giving a guitar infinite sustain), great guitars (the lads favoredYamaha SG2000s and Fender Strats) clever engineering and pure guitar technique to wrench amazing impersonations from their instruments; they loosely modeled bagpipes, Irish fiddles, and all manner of supercharged traditional instruments which, combined with the Gaelic-y arrangements and playing technique, roused talk of a “Celtic revival” in that year that also brought U2, the Alarm and Simple Minds to the charts.

And of course, there was great musicianship; Butler and Brzezicki were superb session musicians before Big Country; Adamson and Watson were excellent in a more restrained, controlled way.

Adamson and Watson rarely played power chords, sticking to carefully-orchestrated one-and-two-note patterns over their carefully-built sound-setups to create a distinctive, loud, joyful noise.

Nearly every song on the album was a keeper:

1. “In a Big Country” – hardly needs explaining, right?
2. “Inwards” – like German techno, played on guitars. By humans.  Who are having fun and not praying for imminent nuclear war.
3. “Chance” – A hit single in the UK, unknown here, but a gorgeous song; spare, evocative guitars and vocal harmonies that, in Tony Butler’s career as a spectacular backup singer, are among his best. Actually one of my two favorite songs on the album.
4. “1000 Stars” – An infectiously danceable bit of Cold War paranoia.
5. “The Storm” – As Scots-Gaelic as the flat side of a claymore.
6. “Harvest Home” – An irresistably danceable song (in the “Sword Dance” vein, rather than “Dancing With The Stars”, or even “Dance Fever with Denny Terrio”), drawn from that bottomless well of Rock and Roll inspiration, the Jacobite Rebellion and the diaspora of Scots afterwards.
7. “Lost Patrol” – Never liked this one all that much; another one of those “Gaelo-Teutonic techno on guitars” things.
8. “Close Action” – My other favorite.
9. “Fields of Fire” – The other single in the US, and one of many great bagpipe impressions…
10. “Porrohman” – A fun bit of guitar-effect wizardry to try to pick apart, but it did in fact get tiresome and shrill after a while. Hey, one out of ten ain’t bad…

The album was a huge splash in 1983.

But the band never really had much impact in the US after their debut; they only charted with one more single (“Wonderland“, from the next year, one of my favorites) which peaked at #86, while Steeltown, my favorite Big Country album, barely dented the album charts in the US (it debuted at #1 in the UK).  Steeltown’s marquee single, the spectacular “Where The Rose Is Sown“, a Falklands War protest of sorts, didn’t show up at all.

I think I spent sixty hours over my “interim” period in 2004 (my college was on a 4-1-4 system – January was spent on one, all-day class for the whole month) learning how to play and imitate every single song on the album. I had the bagpipe thing figured out, anyway…

Adamson, after years of fighting alcoholism,  committed suicide in December of 2001.  The band knocked around in limbo for most of the last decade, held up with legal wrangling among the surviving members and the Adamson estate. They re-united last year, with former Alarm frontman Mike Peters singing lead, and Watson’s son Jamie sitting in on guitar.

I’m gonna down a Newcastle and break out the SG in honor of the anniversary.

SCENE: MITCH runs into Avery LIBRELLE at a bar. It is August 1, 2018. LIBRELLE is slumped, clearly intoxicated, nursing an Appletini.  Four empty Appletini glasses are arrayed on the table. 

MITCH: Wow, Avery. Kinda tying one on, are we?

LIBRELLE: (Mumbles)

MITCH: What’s the matter?

LIBRELLE: Ummmm…I don’t even know. Feeling…disillusioned?

MITCH: (Orders a Smythwicks) Why?

LIBRELLE: Remember all those gay couples who got married five years ago today?

MITCH: The ones that got all the non-stop media coverage? Hard to forget.

LIBRELLE: Well, the statistics show they have…(chokes back a sob)

MITCH: They have what?

LIBRELLE: The…same divorce rate as breeders!

MITCH: Right.

LIBRELLE: And some turned out to be awful spouses! Just like…

MITCH: Go ahead, say it.

LIBRELLE: Just like breeders!

MITCH: I know.  On Cops the other night they showed an episode where the cops intervened in a gay domestic at a trailer park in Mobile Alabama.  As they dragged a woman wearing sweats off to the car, another woman can out of the house yelling “I love you, Ashley!  I’ll be down to bail you out…”, just like…(Notices LIBRELLE is sobbing quietly) – Hey, buck up little camper. Didn’t you all figure gay people were pretty much just like people? 

LIBRELLE: (Angry) NO! They were supposed to show breeders what real love was!  Because they were marrying for love! 

MITCH: Yeah, but wasn’t that an absurd expectation…

LIBRELLE: How could something that so pissed off wingnuts and the Catholic Church be so…

MITCH: Ordinary?

LIBRELLE:  Yes!  (Head starts to wobble a bit)

MITCH:  So you were actually under the impression that gays were better, more virtuous people because the state hadn’t conferred the right to marry on them? 

LIBRELLE:  Right.  Oppression equals nobility!  Everyone knows that!

MITCH:  Unless they’re gun owners in Chicago, conservatives on campus, or vendors of faith who are dragged into court by gay couples for whose weddings they conscientiously object to providing services?

LIBRELLE:  (before even a beat has passed) Right.

MITCH:  Look, Avery – marriage is a very difficult thing.  It’s about completely wrapping your life around and about another person, and usually eventually a bunch of little people, and figuring out how to focus your life on someone else, ideally without completely losing yourself, although that’s way down the list of priorities.  It’s about realizing you’re not the most important thing in the world anymore.  I’m no expert – and I’ve got the court paperwork to prove it – but whether you’re gay or straight, it’s not just about having a fabulous ceremony and a cool honeymoon, and least of all about making a political and social statement to other people.  In fact, getting married to show someone else, whether it’s your parents or your ex or the rest of society or even yourself, may be the worst of the “bad reasons” that people get married for…

(MITCH notices LIBRELLE has passed out.  He puts a $20 on the table, motions to the bartender, and walks away).

(And SCENE)

Say what you will about same-sex marriage. I’ve supported civil unions for most of a decade – but events in Minnesota passed that by.

So lets turn away from the overkill coverage of all those gay weddings amd play a little art appreciation, shall we?

Pick apart the symbolism of this photo, from the MinnPost.

What thousand words is this photo telling us?

Ryan Rhodes on the Twitterverse live-tweeting the Declation of Independence.

I’m hesitant to link it.  Someone from the “Jon Stewart is the News!” set will write it down on an essay test.

Apropos nothing.

Anyway, read it.

Hop to it!

Although there was a general assumption when I was in high school and college that I’d wind up in some kind of graduate school or another, I stopped with the formal schooling (as distinct from getting an education) with my BA. 

I did it for a couple of reasons:

• Nothing that I’d want to get an MA or Ph.D. in – Linguistics, History, German, Writing – would enhance my career, or at least not to the point that there’d be a return on investment. 
• I have absolutely no interest in a business degree.
• I’m not sure that I could find anyplace nearby to get the MA in my field; there are less than 10 places in the country to get a BA in anything like my field, and maybe 3-4 that I know of on the grad level. 
• And if I did?  Not only would getting an advanced degree in my current vocational field – User Experience – have little to no return on investment, it might actually slow me down. 

So unless I hit the powerball – which might lead me to a design-your-own “Masters” in German, writing, history and filmmmaking from whatever institution that’d let me put it together – I strongly doubt you’ll see me darken the door of a grad school, ever. 

But if this were closer than Boulder, I could see myself changing my mind.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Minnesota Department of Education is pulling ads because a DJ made jokes about schools (actually, pretty good jokes).

Worse, these are Public Service Announcements, which run for free. The station is giving away free air time, and the dept is pulling those spots. Did the station management see this coming and set it up to be able to sell that time to a paying account?

And seriously, does anybody believe running a radio ad saying “read more books” will do anything to overcome the centuries-old legacy of slavery, poverty, despair, neglect, crime and Liberalism that is the root cause of illiteracy and ignorance in Minnesota?

This dust-up is proof positive the Department of Education has too little to do and too much money to do it with. Abolish it.

Joe Doakes

More proof they have too much money? Spending literacy money at a top-40 station like KDWB, a station devoted to making people dumber.

Two months ago, Wisconsin (along with, ahem, North Dakota) came in 49th out of 50 states in a Philadephia Fed report on economic growth.

Liberals chortled with glee, declaring Scott Walker a dead issue. 

Then last month the Philly Fed uprated Sconnie to 20th.

And now?

And with new numbers out today for June, Wisconsin is now ranked 5th in new rankings among states on their six month economic outlook. For those keeping track, that’s 40th, to 20th, to 5th in just a couple months.

 

And in another leading economic indicator, the coincidence index, Wisconsin ranks 2nd.

These numbers are not the be-all and end-all of economic reporting.  I’m  not presenting them as such.

But some people sure did. Two months ago, anyway.

…with trying to debate economics with liberals is that even their “elites” have no idea how it works.

I expect conservatives and libertarians to be exercised over the news that the White House is establishing a “Nudge Squad” – a group of behavioral scientists who will work with the government bureaucracy to try to help shape citizen behavior:

“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.

The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.

The document praises subtle policies to change behavior that have already been implemented in England, which already has a “Behavioral Insights Team.” One British policy concerns how to get late tax filers to pay up.

On the one hand, it all sounds very Orwellian.  And it is; using the government to shape peoples’ behavior is a short and utterly undefineable step away from using it to shape peoples’ thought.

On the other hand?  Precisely what has the public education system been since its inception?

They say it can’t happen.

It can.

But miracles are 99% hard work.

Most people – even pro-“choice” Democrats – h favor some sort of restriction on later-term abortions, like the proposed 20 week limit in Texas:

A recent WSJ/NBC news poll has some data that might shock Democrats: Wendy Davis and her sneakers aside, a plurality of Americans support 20 week abortion bans of the kind passed in Texas. Forty-four percent of respondents said they would support the ban, with 37 percent opposed. And the numbers get more interesting the further down you dig. WSJ:

The Journal/NBC poll showed a complexity of views on the bans. More women than men supported the state bans, 46% to 40%. Even college-educated women, a group that strongly supports abortion rights, tipped toward favoring the 20-week restrictions.

And, of course, when you expand the field of questioning from 20-week bans to late-term restrictions in general, the support gets even higher. As Gallup found, “One of the clearest messages from Gallup trends is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.”

As much as liberals genuflect to Europe, you’d think that the fact that even France and Germany put even tighter time limits on abortion – 10-12 weeks, the last I checked – would start even some of them thinking.

And maybe it has, if this poll tells us anything.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Here’s the scenario making the rounds of Liberal blogs:
“Imagine your daughter is walking home from the store, and a man in a car starts following her.
She tries to take a route that his car can’t follow, and he gets out to chase her on foot.
She stops running and defends herself (knees him in the groin, pepper sprays him, whatever).
He doesn’t even try to defend himself with hand-to-hand, he just pulls out a gun and shoots her.
Suddenly, she is called the aggressor and he gets off on self-defense.
Would you still be celebrating? Would it make a difference if your daughter had ever smoked pot?”

Self-defense law is fact-specific. A tiny change in the facts makes all the difference to the outcome. Start from the basic premise that we want people to avoid physical violence, which is why self-defense law includes a duty to retreat if safe. Now tinker with the facts a bit . . .

Suppose Daughter is a 20-year-old Olympic-class runner and Stalker is fat, flabby and forty. She could easily outrun him but instead chooses to turn and knee him. Result: she’s the aggressor and he has the right to defend himself from her wrongful attack but only using proportionate force, not deadly force. If he shoots her, he goes to prison.

Suppose Daughter and Stalker are age, size and condition. She can’t outrun him. She can’t safely retreat. She turns to face him. He says “Hi, new around here? Where you running to?” so she smashes him across the nose with a bat. He staggers and falls on his back. She stands over him lying on the sidewalk, beating his head with the bat. Result: she is the aggressor and he has the right to defend himself from her wrongful attack using deadly force. If he shoots her, he goes free.

Really, is it that hard to understand?

Joe Doakes

If the left couldn’t oversimplify complex issues into meaninglessness, they’d be pretty mute…

Sometime today, The One will be giving his second speech (in Chattanooga) of his tenth attempt, give or take, to “pivot to the economy” in the past five years.

I’ll invite you to read this short but deep piece by Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution, about the shallowness of Obama’s understanding – he’s more of a sloganeer, really – of how economies actually work, and how it’s manifested itself in a middle class that’s been largely bludgeoned into submission.

Read the whole thing, but here’s the conclusion:

Indeed [President Obama] constantly thinks of his greatest regulatory failures as his great successes. No other president has “saved the auto industry,” albeit by a corrupt bankruptcy process, or “taken on a broken health care system,” only to introduce a set of unworkable mandates that are already falling apart, or “investing in new technologies,” which tries to pick winners and ends up with losers like Solyndra. The great advances in energy have come from private developments, most notably fracking, and not from the vagaries of wind and solar energy, which no one has yet figured out how to store for future use when needed.

The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.

It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.

If there were ever a time for someone to come onto the scene – or re-emerge, perhaps – with something on the order of “A Time For Choosing”, this would be it.

While Mitt Romney wasn’t my dream candidate, few things more infuriated me last year than the idea that the Ron Paul wing of the GOP robotically chanted – that Romney was the same as Obama.

That noted conservative tool Salon notes that it just isn’t so.  The article runs down a hypothetical first 200 days of a Romney administration, based on its own publicly stated (and some privately-stated) plans:

Romney aides wince at the comparison, but their 200-day plans sound like a Bain turn-around for America’s economy: a co-ordinated series of shocks aimed at impressing investors, but likely to startle and anger many ordinary folk. Democrats would have scorned it as a wish-list for bosses and billionaires. But Mr Romney believed his reforms would work, and work fast. Benefits would follow swiftly, in the form of private investment and job creation: persuading the wider public to trust in President Romney’s competence, if not to love him.

I don’t care about “loving” a president.  I just care about heading in the right direction. 

We are, currently, not.

Allow me to do an end-zone happy dance.  It may be a brief one, but I’m gonna dance anyway.

Julie Miller, a woman from Oregon, filed suit against Equifax after a two-year battle to get her credit report corrected.  She won an $18 million settlement:

Ms. Miller contacted Equifax eight times between 2009 and 2011 trying to rectify the mistakes. The jury awarded Ms. Miller $18.4million in punitive damages and $180,000 in compensatory damages.

Mistakes included erroneous accounts and collection attempts, the wrong Social Security number and birthday, according to a copy of the lawsuit reviewed by MailOnline.

 

‘There was damage to her reputation, a breach of her privacy and the lost opportunity to seek credit,’ said Portland attorney Justin Baxter. ‘She has a brother who is disabled and who can’t get credit on his own, and she wasn’t able to help him.’

Ms. Miller claims in the suit that she discovered the mangled mess made of her credit report after being denied credit by a local bank in December 2009. She reached out to Equifax and complied with multiple requests for forms and additional information only to have her efforts repeatedly go nowhere. Additional efforts to obtain copies of her credit report also proved unsuccessful.

The credit bureaux should be happy I wasn’t the judge.  I’d have authorized their complete sell-off and liquidation, using the National Guard if necessary.  Yep, I’ve fought with Equifax too. 

The credit reporting industry has an absurd amount of power – and while I joke (and not in a “hah hah” kind of way) about using the Air Force to re-jigger the market, and acknowledge they serve a role in the free market, they do the job really, really badly. 

The 18 million dollar settlement will no doubt get shaved down to $5000 at appeal.  But it’s a start.