Mark Byron

Give Plan B for Her Quinceañera

The early pregnancy terminator Plan B (somewhat similar to RU-486 ["no, I'm Pentium"] back in the day) got green-lighted for over-the-counter sales for gals 15 and over.

Interesting question-what kind of ID does a 15-year-old girl have? If Democrats don't want adults giving IDs in order to vote, what kind of ruckus will result when a poor ninth-grader doesn't have a photo ID and wants to wipe out the side effects of that last hookup. A 16-year-old would likely have a drivers' licence in states where that's the legal minimum, but a 15-year-old might not have anything that would serve as a official ID, since they aren't going to get "carded" for anything.

Even stranger is a court order that would let my pre-school age niece buy it, no questions asked. She's a half-decade away from needing it at least (much later, one would hope), but one district court judge has ordered it to be over-the-counter with no restrictions; that's probably what the administration wants, but wants to tow an awkward line between the devotees of the Church of Planned Parenthood and moderate voters who might not think that letting middle-schoolers get their own pregnancy-preventer is a great idea.

[update 930AM-Plan B is different from RU-486, but does stop an early-stage pregnancy from taking root in the womb. Thanks to my natural family planning ace Kathryn for the correction.]

Forthrightly Dealing With the 4th Amendment

The Constitution bans "unreasonable searches and seizures" in the 4th Amendment. It doesn't mandate a warrant for police to check things in an emergency situation; it's vague enough to have the Supreme Court lay down guidelines of what they see as reasonable and when one can skip a warrant. Not all of the legal nicities like Miranda rights and warrants kick in during a quick-reaction spot.

Yeah, Watertown's door-to-door search is a dicey precedent, but the Boston bombing is a once-a-decade case. Doing that to catch a garden-variety drug dealer would be overkill, but I don't see what went down in metro Boston as unreasonable.

I recall one old cop drama (Picket Fences, if memory serves) where a couple of cops have an iffy search move; one of them says "Rehnquist court...I'll take my chances." Rehnquist has past on and we have the Roberts court, but I'd be hard press to see Anthony Kennedy shooting down what happened last Friday and joining a 5-4 center-left coalition shooting it down. 9-0 for the searches wouldn't be surprising.

Warded Off With a Samurai Night Special

We noted that the disciples were instructed to carry swords in my well-received Would Jesus Pack Heat post. Someone out Utah way (note that since almost all Mormon guys are priests, the church pastor gets the inflated title bishop) took an East Asian spin on that West Asian custom.

A Samurai-wielding Latter Day Saints bishop and others in Millcreek, Utah, came to the aid of a woman who was being attacked and chased by a former co-worker, authorities say.

[Kent] Hendrix was in the shower at approximately 7 a.m. on Tuesday when his teenage son alerted him about a woman's screams for help, ABC 4 in Utah reported. Hendrix, a fourth-degree black belt, put on some clothes — and grabbed the 29-inch steel samurai sword he has owned since he was 17.

Don't tease this guy about his undies. We're lucky Utah didn't pull a page from the UK and think about banning such Samurai Night Specials.

We Have Met the Enemy, and... Who Are They, Anyway?

We've got a slew of folks wanting to make our Boston bomber an "enemy combatant." Watch it Dzhokar, you're about to be gored by a couple of RINOs.

Who's the enemy in question? Militant Islam, one would assume. Define "militant Islam." Does saying tacky things about rape victims and Harry Potter count? If that's the case, than Todd Akin needs to watch what he says about Hogwarts.

While were in the neighborhood, define "combatant." The late bomber Tamerlan was a boxer; if he took a beef with one of the folks at the gym "out back", has he become an enemy combatant? If what we know about their taste in theology is enough to cast them as the enemy, then what level of violence is enough to declare them a combatant?

Unless we get some clear link with an organized terror group, we're much better off letting the justice system deal with our bomber rather than shepherding him into Gitmo. Otherwise, we're judging their theology to see if it is radical enough to count, and what I've seen so far could almost make me a militant Christian if they applied that standard across the theological board. Guess I have to be careful about what I say about rape victims, lest I get on their radar.

The Counter-Revolution Will be Tweeted

I was thumbing through the TV listings and saw a Good Eats rerun on; Alton was making broth ...in a pressure cooker. Given that was the tool of choice of the Boston bomber, I was surpised that they would run it, but they did, even noting how the thing can explode if you don't regulate the pressure properly. Alton is always big on multitaskers, but that wasn't a use he had in mind.

That was 8-830. Slide to CNN and we have the 19 year old bomber cornered. By 8:45, we get the news that he's in custody; the official confirmation comes via a Boston PD tweet. The revolution may not be televised, but the counter-revolution will be tweeted.

Now it becomes a legal case, with indictements and grand juries, along with an investigation into whether they had help.

The late bomber's name (assuming his folks aren't right in that this all as a frame job) was Tamerlan Tsarnaev. I assume that's a variant on the Central Asia leader Tamerlane, a Muslim hero of the 14th century. It would take a rather warped world-view to view his modern namesake as a hero.

[Update 12:15AM-I'm not sure if hero would be the best world for Tamelane. Badass of the Week is an understatement; try half-millennium. That link isn't quite suitable for work and would be best read as if the Randall the Honey Badger guy is reading it; Tamelane might have been the original Honey Badger, now that I think about it.]

Semi-Homemade Terrorists

Part of the debate over the Boston Massacre 2.0 bombers was whether they were home-grown or whether they were jihadis from elsewhere. The answer would seem to be "yes."

They've ID'ed the bombers as a pair of Chechen immigrants. The older of the two is dead at the hands of local police, while the younger of the two heads up the on-line dictionary definition of "armed and extremely dangerous."

One of the brothers, identified by several sources as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, studied engineering at Bunker Hill Community College but had taken off a year to train as a boxer, the source said Friday.

...

Several sources identified the other brother, who remained on the lam, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

The source briefed on the investigation added that it should not be assumed that the brothers were radicalized because of their origins in the Russian Caucasus.

That's true, but there are quite a few jihadis flowing out of Chechnya embittered by Russian maltreatment and egged on by al Qaeda types looking for new cannon fodder.Given that Russian maltreatment of Chechnya, the brothers and others like them have a refugee pedigree which drowns out the jihadi stereotype stateside; in Russia, Chechens are blamed for everything but global warming, but our immigration rules tends to give folks the benefit of the doubt short of clear evidence of radicalization.

Without grilling Dzhokhar or his friends, we can't know for sure, but it would seem that it is better than even money that he's been something resembling "radicalized"; pipe bombs on steroids (pressure cookers were the tool of choice, a trick likely borrowed from Taliban bombers) aren't exactly polite civil discourse.

Dzhokhar looks like he got voted off American Idol a few weeks ago rather than being a terrorist, but they don't come with "Hug me, I'm a Jihadi" T-shirts. I recall a Belgian woman who was a dead ringer for Kristy McNichol; she became a suicide bomber in Iraq after marrying a Muslim and going jihadi. You don't need to look like a crazed radical to be one.

There's an interesting story to be told here. Some legit anger at Pooty-poot and his troops might have been morphed into a generic hatrid of infidels; that's merely the leader in the clubhouse of possible rationales.

Jewell of the Charles

Back in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, a security guard named Richard Jewell who found the bomb and helped clear the area became a "person of interest" of the FBI, not charged with a crime but not cleared, either. If memory serves, he had to sue to clear his name.

We've got echoes of that with the Hispanic Cowboy from the Boston bombing, a cowboy-hat wearing volunteer medic named Carlos Arredondo who took people to the medical station. Arredondo now is getting the white-glove treatment from the FBI.

He says Boston Police and the FBI came to his Roslindale home and questioned him about the bombing. When they left, they took some items.

“They took my clothes, my shoes my pants, my t-shirt, whatever they needed I provided to them,” Arredondo told WBZ-TV.

Hopefully, he won't get the Jewell treatment; authorities often forget lessons of the past unless they're reminded of them.

Bammed in Boston

Odd story out of Boston... someone bombed the Boston Marathon earlier this afternoon; two are dead and another score have been hospitalized. The bombing happened a couple of hours after the winners had finished, so it wouldn't have been aimed at having too many East Africans winning the big marathons. At the 4-hour mark of a marathon, you have recreational runners for the most part.

A local crazy, maybe? An anti-patriot messing with the celebration of Patriot's Day? It doesn't smell like a jihadi, but it's likely far too early for armchair profiling.

Not only do you have downtown Boston messed up, you have hundreds of runners and their families who just had what is often the highlight of a running career ruined. Not good; prayers are an order.

"What Do You Mean 'We', Robot?"

This was going to happen in some college town the way things were going, but UVA's home town of Charlottesville is now a drone-free zone.

The resolution, passed Monday, "calls on the United States Congress and the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to adopt legislation prohibiting information obtained from the domestic use of drones from being introduced into a Federal or State court," and "pledges to abstain from similar uses with city-owned, leased, or borrowed drones."

I guess that's full employment policy for city pilots. On the domestic level, civil-liberties groups are fearful of eyes in the sky on too regular a basis; it was a civil-liberties maven who spearheaded the Wahoo ban.

However, I don't see that much, if any, of a difference between an old-school bear-in-the-air police plane or helicopter than a drone. If the cops see something naughty going on from the air in your backyard, that doesn't strike me as an unreasonable search; that doesn't change if the aircraft in question has a pilot or not.

There does seem to be something...unsporting about drones. "Be a man and fly over yourself" seems to an underlying theme, especially when it applies to using armed drones to take out al Qaeda types.

I'm reminded of the Bill Maher quip about modern Air Force pilots dropping bad juju from 5 miles up being cowards compared to the 9/11 bombers; the latter takes more guts, even if it was badly misguided at best. Add the even more remote nature of the modern drone compared to the stealthy manned bombers of the turn of the millennium and that yeller meme is amped up a notch from that.

The rifle was sneered at when introduced; real warriors used arrows, not bullets. Rifles didn't require as much skill as a bow, which reduced the value of the warrior class as an elite. It also allowed to rain down death at a longer distance which was harder to counter at first.

Some of that might be at play here; drones seem wimpy, somehow.

However, do we want to have live pilots delivering the bad juju? Do we want the occasional death or capture of a pilot if a plane gets shot down or crashes due to malfunction or other accident? Not if we can help it.

The judge, jury and executioner nature of the "kill list" rubs our due-process sensibilities the wrong way; however, having a cruise missile or manned bomber deliver the rough justice won't change that problem. To the extent that things are dealt with from a military perspective rather than a judicial one, "taking out" an enemy combatant is legit; we're not in position to drive up to their hide-out in the back country of Yemen or Pakistan and serve them a warrant.

That warfare approach is the real issue, not the drones. Drones just add that odd, unsporting sense of detachment that will help sway public opinion against both domestic police surveillance use and international military combat use.

Smaller Magazines? They Could Always Publish Online and Save Paper

New York state just lowered the allowed size of gun magazines to 7 from 10. It will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court chimes in at some point. Could you limit magazines to one bullet and effectively ban most guns that we currently use?

At some point, you're affecting someone's ability to use a gun in self-defence. However, your gun control mavens think it's the police's job to protect us... if we're still alive by the time they get to the scene.

A Beautifully-Hacked Mind

I remember some of Steve Jobs' backstory, where he devised a gizmo to let you hot-wire your telephone to get free long distance; "phreakers" was the nickname for those lower-tech hackers. One of Job's contemporaries found that a Cap'n Crunch toy whistle would give the tones to bypass the fee gauges, giving him the nom-de-guerre of Captain Crunch.

Crunch got busted and served five years probation for his dark-side hacks, but Jobs went on to Apple and Pixar fame.

I was thinking of them in the context of Aaron Swartz, who helped developed RSS and Reddit and hacked federal and academic databases for fun and infosocialism; Swartz committed suicide after fighting off depression most of his 26-year life. The federales were on his case for the gray-side hacks, including doing Wikileaks-esque data dumps of JSTOR and federal court case databases and putting them into free public domain.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Larry Lessig have moving, if occasionally bleepable, eulogies for the young man. They both worked with him, with Lessig helping him fight off the criminal charges for the data-dumps. Swartz had his emotional issues in spades, but a lot of especially high-level geniuses have had their issues on that front.

Unlike Wikileaks, which put a lot of national-security secrets into the public eye for better and worse, Swartz's hacks were of relatively low value documents; the legal database was charging a whopping eight cents a case. Swartz wanted that rounded down to zero for the greater good, but went around intellectual property law to do it.

There's a Robin Hood aspect to Swartz, but robbing from the power that be and giving to the public at large (he wasn't profiting from the hacks; he's been big on open-source communalism in software) is still robbing. Robin of Locksley would be up on charges for his highwayman act even today, and low-impact gray-side hacks are still assaults on IP.

Great mind, twisty ethics. As someone who has had a lower-grade fight with depression, I can relate to his struggles. As someone who has been around computers for almost four decades, I can relate and appreciate a creative genius, but he used it in some left-handed ways.

Try Gang Control

An ad on my Facebook Scrabble game pleaded that "Gun violence is out of control." Actually, it is lower than it has been in the past, but on one level, it's always out of control. The only controlled gun violence would be done by the police or the military.

To the extent that we have freedom, crime is out of the control of the government; we're not to the Minority Report level where they keep you from doing crimes ahead of time. A ban on firearms merely takes such weapons out of the hands of law-abiding citizens; states with more permissive gun laws actually have less gun violence per capita.

The vast majority of gun crime is gang-related. That's not going to be easily stopped by banning big clips or whatever makes Sen. Feinstein uneasy. That takes changing the youth and young adult culture, mostly (but not exclusively) in tougher parts of town; for most gangsters, firearms violations will likely be a mere tack-on to other more-serious charges they face if and when the cops catch up to them.

We have a small handful of mass murders each year, but the bigger problem with gun crime isn't the exurban psycho going postal at a school or theater every so often. Detroit had 378 murders this year; that's over a Sandy Hook a month, but it's generally done one or two at a time, so we don't have the center-left punditry up in arms over it.

Any gun control law that passes Second Amendment muster won't make much of a dent in that. It might slow down the otherwise law-abiding gunner from doing damage, but it won't do much to stop the few-at-a-time violence that claims far more folks than the big events that make the news.

Friday in a Fallen World

The folks at I-Monk have it nailed as far as the responce to Friday morning's tragedy; wordless tears a la Job's friends. Not quiet tears, mind you, for wailing out is proper, but this isn't the time for argument.

We get the stock argments from the left on gun control, stock arguments from the right on how no-gun zones at schools give shooters free reign until the cops get there and vague discussions on how disturbed folks shouldn't have access to guns from across the spectrum.

None of the three are likely to happen; the First Amendment takes care of the first, while gut resposonce from swing voters will nix the second. The logistics of idenitifying and disarming every troubled person will get nixed from multiple angles; the gun folks won't like it, the advocates for the mentally ill won't like it and the psych profession gets stuck with the prospect of having one of their charges going postal and getting hit with a malpractice suit for not saying something.

The nature of the American beast means that we have one of these every so often, and we really can't do too much about it short of turning into either the Wild West were a plurality of folks are packing heat or a police state where the mentally defective are locked up as a precautionary measure.

Some things just happen and we can't do much about them.

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Sensible Gun Control and Sensibility

They Don't Teach Math at Harvard Law

Well, they don't have to, since that's hopefully covered in your undergrad days, but the president seemed to have missed a few math classes along the way.

"These so-called right-to-work laws, they don't have anything to do with economics; they have everything to do with politics," President Obama said.

"What they're really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money."

Now, if I remember the law correctly, you have the option to not have dues taken out, which would give you more money than you had before the law passed. The only way this would create less money for workers is if the union paid you to belong, supplementing your income.

The liberal logic here is that it would make it harder to get raises if not everyone was paying dues; also, if only 80% or so of folks went on strike, the 20% of non-members would make a viable nucleolus to work scab-temps around, thus making a strike less painful to management and less useful as a bargaining tool. If that hold, it would create downward pressure on wages; it's an open question whether that effect will be less than the union dues.

However, in the short-term, it's the status quo for the union members and a modest raise in take-home pay for the dissenters. It's a modest drop in take-home pay for union HQs; that's why they doth protest too much.

The Right to Terrorize?

Are Democrats really prepared to declare war on the people of Michigan? Here's the old Downriver warhorse, John Dingle-

Dingell argued Monday that if [Michigan governor Rick] Snyder doesn't veto the Republican [right to work] legislation, it "will create intolerable conditions between management and labor and between labor and the citizens."

Let's check out that last one. If workers have the right not to join a workplace union, either the citizens will make things intolerable for workers (not likely) or workers will make things intolerable for citizens.

Wildcat strikes, perhaps? Vandalism-a shreading of state tax refund checks, perhaps? Extra auditing of Republican tax returns? Slashing tires of cars with Tea Party stickers?

Would that make the Democratic party or the UAW a terrorist group?

Hopefully, Dingel doesn't mean all that, but such union thugishness isn't unheard of.

Sensible Gun Control and Sensibility

I don't think terms like "stupid" and "tragedy troll" help the conversation on Second Amendment rights. Bob Costas is sane, has an above-average IQ and doesn't appear to be the second coming of Mussolini.

Are there too many guns in the hands of young adults (especially football and basketball pros) at a higher risk of misusing them? Yes. That's the lion share of what Costas was lamenting.

The problem lies in what to do about that. Here's part of Costas' remix on the issue.

I never mentioned the Second Amendment. I never used the words gun control. People inferred that. Now do I believe we need more comprehensive and more sensible gun control legislation? Yes, I do. That doesn't mean repeal the Second Amendment. That doesn't mean a prohibition on somebody having a gun to protect their home and their family. It means sensible and more comprehensive gun control legislation.

As it turns out, they rightly inferred his left-of-center take on the issue. The problem with the Belcher case is that "sensible and more comprehensive gun control legislation" would have to tread deep into Second Amendment rights if you're going to stop Saturday's shooting. One guy. One garden-variety handgun. A reasonable amount of ammo.

Do we stop the ammo? That would make the right to bear arms meaningless if you don't have anything to fire. Could oversight of folks stocking up for a small civil war like the Batman theater shooter flag Belcher ahead of time? No. Limiting ammo purchases to a reasonable amount might stop Aurora, but not KC. It would also possibly flag recreational target shooters who practice an "unreasonable amount" from the persepctive of a gun control maven.

Do we stop the pistol? You toss self-defence out the window if you're restricted to long-guns.

Do we stop the guy from owning the gun in the first place? The answer there would be some sort of restrictive permit to carry a gun where you'd have to positively prove you weren't the type of angry person who is likely to misuse a gun.

Do you flag anyone going to a psychologist? Does the psychologist have a duty to pull the gun permits from anyone on the edgy side that might go off if things break the wrong way. If that's the case, you're going to severely discourage folks seeking help for emotional problems and tend to disproportionately pull licences from folks in stressful situations, like tough neighborhoods.

That starts running into 14th Amendment issues as well as 2nd, disarming poor minority communities, or at least the law-abiding members of said communities; the folks on the dark side will have their ways of getting their heaters.

Thus, there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to have kept a gun out of Mr. Belcher's hands, unless your idea of reasonable includes disarming most folks under psych care.

Such "sensible gun control" would trod on a large block of modern sensibilities, like the rights of minorities, the rights of folks with mild emotional problems and that pesky right to arm bears (if they call them "sportsmen" shouldn't the prey get a sporting chance to shoot back?).

Lowering the Heat

Bob Costas stirred up a hornet's nest last night, citing an anti-gun-culture essay by Jason Whitlock regarding the Javon Belcher shootings of Saturday.

"Our current gun culture," Whitlock wrote, "ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead."

That is true, even if you are card-carrying NRA member.

However, this is more an indictment of modern youth culture than of the Second Amendement. If a sub-culture has a leaning towads violence, giving said folks guns will tend to do more harm than good. Self-defence is quick to turn into offense if you take offense at something.

Can you do violence without guns? Yes, but what's the last drive-by-knifing you heard of?

"Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions, and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows?"

"But here," wrote Jason Whitlock," is what I believe. If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."

I'll buy that. Could he have knifed his girlfriend and himself, or beat his girlfriend to a pulp then drove his car off a bridge? Yes, but both acts are harder to pull off than the simple pull of a trigger. A murder-suicide by knife in Wyoming last week is case in point that such things can happen, but they're far rarer than the lead-poisoning version.

He'd also have a shot to think better of it between swings or stabs than between trigger pulls.

Also, I didn't see any calls for repeal of the Second Amendment in either piece. It may have been assumed in the rhetoric, but one can be against the casual packing of heat and be supportive of folk's right to an armed self-defence.

You also have the right not to bear arms. If you might be temped to use it in anger in something other than self-defence, it would likely be a bad idea to have a gun handy.

I don't know Belcher's back-story. He might well have had a legit need to have a gun on him. However, something tipped him over the edge Saturday, and the edge was easier to go over with a gun handy.

 

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Bullets at Arrowhead

Dough-Boy In the Limelight

We've got a couple of hometown boys making news these days; Midland has the House Ways and Means Chairman and the Michigan AG as Dow High school-buddies (Dow High is my Midland High's arch-rival; since it is on the upscale side of Midland, we would call them the Dough-boys). AG Bill Schuette had what is now Dave Camp's House seat until a failed run for the US Senate; Camp got the seat and never gave it back. After spending a couple decades in semi-limbo as a state senator and appeals-court judge, he's in the statewide limelight as AG.

The news item that goe Schuette on the laptop is a state anti-affirmative-action law that got shot down by an en-banc 6th circuit. The vote was 8-7, so this is a very narrow decision that is bound to head to the Supreme Court; Schuette is already pledging to make an appeal.

It's interesting that a law that makes it illegal to discriminate for under-represented demographic groups is discriminatory, but that's what a majority of the 6th Circuit has ruled. Paging Anthony Kennedy; it's your call, in all likelihood, since this smells like a 5-4 split either way.

Schuette will then get his day in the sun pleading Michigan's case; as AG, he'd likely be first in line for the governor's nomination in 2018 when Gov. Tough Nerd gets term-limited, and such gigs only help build gravitas for a run for the big chair.

Closing Down Lover's Lane and Sex Drive

When I saw the headline of Bolivians amputating thieves' hands, it reminded me of the eye-for-an-eye style of justice often seen in Islamic countries; the article-writer went that route-

The cutting off of hands has been used around the world for centuries as a way to punish thieves. Under Islamic law, the punishment is sometimes used part of Hdud and usually refers to the class of punishments that are fixed for certain crimes that are considered to be "claims of God."

Just a few months ago, a thief convicted of theft in war-torn Mali had his hand cut off by one of the radical Islamist groups controlling the northern part of the country.

The other rough justice technique to come out of the Andes is chemical castration-"the administration of medication designed to reduce libido and sexual activity." That would actually be less harsh than having your hand cut off, but your mileage may vary.

The more civilized version of libido-reduction goes back a couple of decades. I recall a case in Michigan in the 80s where a sex offender got treated with Depo-Provera; that lead to the op-ed cartoon in the CMU student newspaper of a gal at the bar, saying "Give this man a shot... of Depo-Provera."

Bolivia is supposed to be a progressive country; its president is in the Hugo Chavez school of populist-leftists, especially big on getting power to the indigenous folks who've gotten crapped on worse than the First Nations/Native American folks in North America. However, leftist doesn't always mean progressive, since a lot of the grace and mercy that is at play in Christian thought can go out the window when we throw that out with the colonial bathwater.

HI Ho,Silver, Go Back-Door!

The NBA will be getting a new boss next year; David Stern is stepping down and Adam Silver, the current deputy commissioner, will take over. One interesting aspect is that you have one New York Jewish lawyer handing the reins over to another New York Jewish lawyer. Not that any of that is disqualifying, but it plays all too well into stereotyping. Since the league HQ is in New York, a NYC lawyer would be the kind of guy to deal with the business end of the league, and New York is about as Jewish as any big town outside of Israel, so that's not a huge coincidence. Heck, a third of the Supreme Court are Jewish lawyers.

When I Googled for Silver's ethnicity, I saw a number of groups the Southern Poverty Law Center likely has long files on. Yuck. That will add to any dislike they'll have for all the blacks and fer'ners that make up the league these days.

As a fan, I'd like to see a former player or former coach in that role, but the commissioner is the guy the owners turn to for running the business, so lawyers get most of the spots. Silver seems to know his stuff, so things are in reasonable hands.

Guys, You're On Your Own

Here's a Michigan Democrat page that has an ad for the trio of female jurists they have up as a tag-team package for the state Supreme Court; I saw a version of this via Facebook ads.

“Connie Marie Kelley, Shelia Johnson and Bridget Mary McCormack have spent their careers protecting families and victims of violent crime,” Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer said. “They have taken criminals off the streets and kept children out of gangs. In addition, they have zero tolerance for violence against women and kids. Kelley, Johnson and McCormack protect Michigan’s families.”

That would imply that they have some tolerance for violence against adult males. Shouldn't the proper response be to have no love of violence regardless of who is the target?

It also begs the question on what defines "zero tolerance." Would that entail taking the full extent of the law against the three year old who clobbers his 18-month-old brother when he gets his toy taken from him? Or does that zero tolerance only kick in if the attacker is of a certain age or a certain gender?

Jonesboro's Homicide Jones

Milwaukee had a pair of house-of-worship shootings in a decade; Jonesboro, Arkansas has had a pair of odd homicide cases in 14 years. Last month, a young black guy, Chavis Carter, reportedly shot himself in the head with a gun... while handcuffed...in the back of a police car... after he had been searched...twice. Folks of color are more than a bit skeptical of that low-probability package.

Sadly, Jonesboro was in the news 14 years ago, when a pair of middle-schoolers shot up their school, setting off a fire alarm then ambushing folks as the fled the building; five people died that day.

For some reason, the phrase "Jonesboro Seven" is stuck in my head, with a case of some black teens getting railroaded in the Jim Crow south being attached to that phrase; Google doesn't help. Maybe the Peanut Gallery could point to something that would almost fit that. There was a Greensboro Seven of anti-Bush protesters, but that isn't it.

Shooting the Messanger

This story hits home on a number of levels. My sister-in-law and two of her best-buddy bridesmaids are Aggies, so anything Texas A&M throws up a flag for Eileen and I. Secondly, I worked briefly for a firm who did process-serving, delivering legal paperwork to individuals; my job was to double-check on various databases the possible addresses that the folks might be and make sure we weren't missing any when they came up empty.

Well, in College Station, just off campus, someone did the inverse of Bob Marley's famous song; he did shoot the sheriff's deputy who was serving eviction papers.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund noted that the slain constable, Brian Bachmann, is the sixth law enforcement official killed so far this year in Texas.

According to his Facebook campaign page, Bachmann was a 41-year-old from College Station who had been a Brazos County sheriff's deputy since 1993. The county's website indicated that his four-year term as constable -- a position that involves, among other duties, serving court documents such as eviction notices and subpoenas to citizens -- was set to expire on December 31, 2014.

I'm surprised in the down economy that someone else hadn't taken their frustration out on a process-server delivering foreclosure documents with a gun. The shooter was killed by police, but not before Mr. Bachmann and an innocent bystander were killed.

You Don't Know Jack... the Dripper

The Gabby Giffords shooter, Jared Loughner, did a plea deal for life in prison on the federal charges against him. He had suffered from schizophrenia, but not enough to be deemed insane; drug treatment made him coherent enough to stand trial and make a plea bargain.

Given his problems, making a death penalty rap stick would be an iffy proposition given the trend towards commuting the sentences of folks with severe mental illness. Sparing the US taxpayers two teams of lawyers for a decade fighting over a trip to Jack the Dripper makes fiscal sense and does bring closure...

...well, not quite. Arizona could still press capital charges if they want to take a whack at the Roberts Court (or whoever gets the final call around 2025 by the time the appeals got done; Roberts should still be there, but half the current court could turn over by then) letting them execute Loughner. A hang-'em-high DA might want to make that call, even if it would be rather costly for the state to try.

Strange Bedfellows

Anthony Kennedy did vote to strike down the individual mandate, but he found himself in the odd spot of being on the short-end of a 5-4 vote. Chief Justice Roberts crossed the divide and sided with the four liberals in upholding "Obamacare" and its individual mandate.

That gives an interesting spin to the fall election, where the debate will be, to borrow from Slick Willie's construct on affirmative action, whether to mend it or end it.

As one of those folks who currently fall through the insurance cracks, that would seem to be a good thing, but it will tend to slow the economy down as the cost of hiring folks will go up for companies are looking at being forced to either get fined or provide health insurance.

Catch and Normalize

I'm actually somewhat pleased with the Obama administration's new rules letting young illegals normalize themselves. It's going to make immigration hawks hot and bothered, but I'm more concerned with getting rid of the outlaw status either by normalization or deportation. When you can here as a kid (<16) have kept your nose clean and  have been here five years, they would seem to be more valuable to keep rather than frog-marching them over the border.

Yes, they broke the law, I hear you in the back right. So probably did you the last time you were on the expressway and fudged a 65 speed limit into 70 to keep up with traffic. You weren't even dragged into that fudge by your parents.

Politically, it would have made more sense to to this via passing a new law rather than via a administrative decree. Not only will it make the right mad on content but on style as well; the trap being set is to make Republicans look like ogres for wanting to send back winsome college kids who did nothing wrong other than being dragged stateside by their parents. Hopefully, they'll not take that bait.

[Update 6:30PM-It looks like The Daily Caller bit like a Doberman, and in an unruly fashion at that. Way to stay classy, folks.]

Overcharge

I haven't seen anyone directly comment on the prospect that Florida officials may have gone a bit overboard with a 2nd-degree murder charge on Mr. Zimmerman. Here's the definition from the Florida code that will be a great aid to his defense team-italics added.

The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree...

That's going to be hard to prove. The fact that the guy was part of a neighborhood watch program points to something well short of the depraved psychopath the law is envisioning. To do that would require a major character assassination on the part of the prosecution, for it would only take one person our of twelve to say "whoa, isn't that a bit much for this scenario?"

If the prosecution is smart, they'll give the jury the option of a lower, manslaughter-type charge, which seems to better fit the case if self-defense isn't a good fit. However, that might not have been enough to keep the rhetorical lynch mob at bay who would want nothing short of a murder rap to be applied.

The Rodney King case comes to mind, where the first trial had the cops essentially up on attempted murder charges; when the jury was faced with the counter-argument that they were merely beating the crap out of King rather than trying to kill him, they took it and inadvertently set up some of the nastier rioting of my adult lifetime.

If a secondary charge isn't offered as an alternative, we're looking at a similar dynamic in the Treyvon case, where Zimmerman will be overcharged, acquitted and walking. That won't be pretty and will leave the White House of 2013 with the option of doing one of those "violate his civil rights" double-jeopardy end-runs to try him at the federal level as in the King case, assuming that the self-defense charge is weak enough to make a second trial hard to win for the feds.

Life and Death

"Mexican Cartel Leader Gets Life"-We all often struggle to find the meaning of life, but it's refreshing to see someone get it.

Oh, life in prison. Considering he offed three folks associated with the US consulate in Ciudad Juarez, he's lucky to just get life, although that might be a tool to placate the Mexican government, as they don't like seeing their nationals get the death penalty.

________________

Tomorrow, we mark the anniversary of one man executed on trumped-up charges, but He too knew the meaning of life; His was designed to be given for us all as the sacrifice to end them all.

May all the folks south of the border worshiping the Death Saint figuratively or literally turn to the God of life who trashed Death for us.

The Other Mark

If you're looking for news of my Cincy namesake, here's a link. I'm not him. I only visited there a few times, am not a photographer, and have a nearly inactive Facebook account.

This story might have some legs, since the court order of an on-line apology a day for a month to an estranged wife does have some First Amendment issues attached to it.

When I kept getting people coming in looking for me in Google, I wondered what I did or whether some old post was in the news. Nope, twern't me.

[Note-2/25:the post has been edited to remove bogus information on my part per my namesake's request.]

Club Gitmo; Not Just for Fur'ners Anymore

Who needs the Freedom to Ship Act? They may have passed the enabling legislation yesterday.

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the "war on terror" to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

The legislation's supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law's critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.

All that's missing is declaring the Occupiers terrorists and the Newtownian clause to tell the courts to get lost.