In Wisconsin, the politics got ugly. The WSJ has an update on judge who stopped one effort at trolling the opposition for something to label as criminal.

“John Doe probes operate much like grand juries, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches while gag orders require the targets to keep quiet. We wrote about the kitchen-sink subpoenas and morning raids by special prosecutor Francis Schmitz that targeted dozens of conservative groups that participated in the battle to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker (“Wisconsin Political Speech Raid,” Nov. 16, 2013).

“Now we learn that Judge Gregory A. Peterson ruled on Friday that at least some of those subpoenas were improper. They “do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws,” he wrote. His opinion remains under seal but we obtained a copy.”
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“Democrats would love to intimidate and muzzle the local activists who rallied to Mr. Walker’s recall defense. And the subpoenas all but shut down these activists, forcing them to hire lawyers and defend themselves rather than contribute to the political debate in an election year.”
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“The John Doe process has become a political weapon intended to serve partisan ends regardless of the law. Kudos to a judge who was brave enough to read the law and stop it, but there’s more free-speech defending to do.”

The Christie Traffic Jam is being compared to the NPS shutdown’s in October. Those activities are mild stuff when compared to political prosecutions and prosecutorial abuse. The use of the legal system to harass, intimidate, and distract seems to have no end. Even McD’s is being sued — again — for having coffee that is too hot. The long term implications for the legal system are not good.

Ed Morrissey describes how the NYT notices hot new trend among sheriffs: ignore gun-control laws.

“What happens when legislatures pass unworkable or just plain stupid laws? Thanks to the innovators at the White House, who love to ignore laws in their own signature legislation when they become inconvenient (like employer mandates in ObamaCare), other executive-branch enforcement agencies have begun to follow suit.”
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“If this imperial-executive model is good enough for the federal government, don’t expect the states to eschew it for very long for their own priorities.”

The executive may find a law difficult to understand or difficult to enforce or just plain stupid. All such results measure the quality of the law and present society of a dilemma when enforcement is misdirected, confused, or absent. An even more ominous outcome is when ideology comes up to practical reality and the executive starts to try to adjust enforcement to fit with ad hoc and random efforts.

The “Knockout Game” has finally surfaced in the news. It has been popular for a while. SOWELL: Media is playing a very dangerous game — Suppression of news about racial attacks allows the violence to fester describes the phenomena and its history. It appears that this is another racial violence thing that the top of the political heap is trying to sweep under the rug.

“What is politically expedient is to do what Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is doing — launching campaigns against schools that discipline a “disproportionate” number of black male students. New York City’s newly elected liberal mayor is expected to put a stop to police “stop and frisk” policies that have reduced the murder rate to one-fourth of what it was under liberal mayors of the past.

Apparently, political correctness trumps human lives.

Providing cover for hoodlums is a disservice to everybody, including members of every race, and even the hoodlums themselves. Better that they should be suppressed and punished now rather than continue on a path that is likely to lead to prison, or even to the execution chamber.”

People do get tired of being beaten and their patience tends to wear thin after a while. “The way to prevent a race war, though, is by stopping these attacks, not trying to sanitize them.” Sanitizing is what you see in the Martin/Zimmerman case as well that netted the parents of the mugger a nice reward. It is what you see on commentary and interview shows when someone comes up with the ‘bored teen’ meme or other rationalizations. It is a very dangerous game trying to hide a race war with psychological denial functioning as propaganda.

This story is about The Persecution of Wisconsin Conservatives and falls into the idea that the left knows, absolutely, that all voter fraud is by conservatives.

“Conservative political entities who supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker are being subjected to a secret investigation. Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz has issued a series of subpoenas to 29 conservative groups, demanding that they submit all documentation related to the recall campaigns mounted by unions and their supporters against Walker in 2011 and 2012. The investigation is being conducted under the auspices of the state’s John Doe law, which forbids the targets of subpoenas from revealing the contents of those subpoenas to anyone other than their lawyers.”

After the Attorney General’s dropping of the Black Panther case, the IRS scandals, and other revelations about policital use of the government, this sort of behavior should stimulate fear in all. Couldn’t happen here? Only if you are blind to what has already happened and is still in progress.

The fortieth anniversary of the Endangered Species Act is the occasion for Theodore Hadzi-Antich to describe why he thinks Bureaucrats run free.

“The extent of government intrusion is exacerbated by the government’s misinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act. For example, the act requires that, before critical habitat can be designated, economic impacts must be considered. How did the federal government “consider” economic impacts before designating critical habitat for the green sturgeon? Based on a legal opinion issued by a federal lawyer in Washington, the federal government decided that all it had to do was to “carefully think” about economic impacts, and that it could do so without quantifying those impacts. In other words, staring out the window and musing constitutes a sufficient economic analysis under the act. Could there be a competent economist on Earth who seriously thinks that economic impacts can be analyzed without using numbers?”

Thomas Lifson’s book review of Jack Cashill’s If I Had a Son concludes that it “is an important work that deserves a large audience”. The book is about the Black Grievance Industry (BGI) propaganda campaign to railroad a mugging victim acting in self defense and the impact of a blogging group that dug up the facts to counter the propaganda campaign to railroad justice.

“But the most surprising heroes comprise a group of 8 previously unheralded bloggers, working at the website Conservative Treehouse, who made history. Although they scrupulously avoided any contact with the defense team, their work, relentlessly exploring and testing information related to the case, freely available online to anyone, provided invaluable support to the defense. Cashill believes that they may have made the difference in Zimmerman’s acquittal. The prosecution, despite having the resources of the state of Florida at its disposal, did not have an outside group X-raying information, and utilizing open source investigating techniques, dedicated to uncovering the truth.

The Treepers, as they are known, have ushered in a new era in not just the media coverage of important trials, but in the conduct of such trials. Historians of media and legal historians would do well to read this book and grasp the fact that the internet and citizen journalists have created a new era of justice.”

The saga has entered the collective and you can see its effect every now and then when it is used as an example in a way that takes the BGI narrative as axiomatic. The problem with a book exposing the problems with such presumptions is that it takes the path of reason and that is not in the same realm as those who espouse the grievances.

“Private property owners can go bankrupt litigating to defend and protect their property rights, and government bureaucrats and lawyers rely on that as part of their strategy to push their extortive agendas. Property owners have skin in the game; government bureaucrats and lawyers do not.”

Mark J. Fitzgibbons describes how a Virginia Farmer Starts Property Rights Legal Revolution.

“When Virginia’s Fauquier County cited farmer Martha Boneta last year for hosting a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls because she did not have a permit and site plan, little did county officials think they would set off a revolution for legal remedies against such abuses.”

What is troubling is that there are groups that believe your property is their property. This includes groups like the Virginia Association of Counties and environmentalist NPO’s. The problems and issues involved include the presumption that legislation is constitutional even if it is very local and created by, say, three of five county commissioners. This is compounded by the fact that those who think society has primacy are often activists and quite agressive in promoting their ideas about the idea that their view of social needs surmounts and surpasses your rights as a property holder.

“For normal Americans, it’s “follow the law or face the consequences.” It’s time to hold overweening bureaucrats to the same standard. Hopefully Boneta Bill 2.0 will be the next of many steps toward stopping the legal loopholes for government, and toward consequences for government bureaucrats who don’t play by the rules.”

This idea is showing up in many debates. It was one of the sticking points in the budget confrontation recently in regards to health care legislation and subject to an idea for a Constitutional ammendment as well. Those in the government, the bureaucrat class, must abide by the same laws and the citizen. A part of this is responsibility and accountability for actions taken.

Monte Frank provides a good illustration of just why modern debate is so debased. The column is Stand against stand-your-ground laws — “Many states empower ordinary citizens to act as vigilantes using lethal force. Do we really want to be a nation of Dirty Harrys?“

“Welcome to America in 2013, where the culture of violence has taken over – so much so that Senate hearings on gun violence cannot proceed unimpeded by another mass shooting and the resulting senseless deaths of ordinary citizens who merely got up and went to work in the country’s capital city.”

This contrasts with

“Fortunately, my state, Connecticut, is not a stand-your-ground state. Connecticut adheres to the traditional common law “castle doctrine”, which provides that an individual does not have a duty to retreat when in his or her home, or “castle”, and may use reasonable force, including deadly force, to defend his or her property, person, or another. In certain circumstances, the law permits one to attack an intruder and use a firearm instead of first retreating. Forty-six states currently follow the castle doctrine.”

The obsession with Dirty Harry is perhaps one of the first clues that the argument is lacking in intellectual integrity. The created dichomoty between the “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” doctrines is another. The false idea that “stand your ground” legalizes vigilantes is another. Labeling a victim of an assault as a “vigilante” and then pretending this is a “stand your ground” issue rather than a self defense issue just illustrates how loose and free Frank is when it comes to reality.

The fact is that “culture of violence” is another falsehood — violent crime with guns has been decreasing in recent decades. Stand your ground laws are simply supporting the idea that you can defend yourself if you have no other option. They do not allow you to go after anyone who you might think is after you. The only difference with castle doctrine laws is that you can defend yourself out of the home as well as within it.

The column is a good lesson in constructing a straw man in order to wail away at a perceived injustice with absolutely no regard for intellectual integrity. The real question is why such dishonesty gets placement in anything pretending to be a news source.

“The illegitimate orders that government workers followed during the shutdown might seem like minor infractions, but those who committed them should think about where they would draw the line. Authoritarian regimes often start by demanding that their staffs make minor infringements of civil liberties, but these tend to grow quickly until the people are cowed. Soon, government workers who are doing what they know to be wrong become too frightened of the monster they helped create to stop.”

RAHN: When shutdown orders overrule the Constitution.

After WWII, the excuse of “just following orders” was considered an invalid defense. That was military. What about civilian? The boundaries are being explored and the consequences might be significant.

John Hinderaker says Obama’s Shutdown Theater Reaches New Low describes the case of Chris Cox and concludes

“I have always been an optimist, but no more. I no longer live in the United States of America. This is some other country I don’t recognize.”

Then there’s the Coyote Blog with three reasons to take the legal route about having his business closed in answering the question “Should I Resort to Civil Disobedience And Re-Open Our Privately-Funded Parks?“

“The real question here is whether they have proper justification for doing so, or whether their suspension is arbitrary.  In another post I discuss why this action is arbitrary and unjustified … The Administrative Procedure Act makes it illegal for a government agency to make a decision that is arbitrary, capricious or an abuse of discretion. … The decision that developed campgrounds run by private companies must close, but undeveloped camping can continue, makes no sense and is arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion.”

If he went the civil disobedience route, it is his employers and customers who would be at risk and he doesn’t think this proper. His last reason is that he is all in with a company that does about half its business with the Forest service and cannot risk losing it.

There are many who are beginning to wonder just what happened to the country. Maybe they will wake up and take it back. A first step is to get past the propaganda feeding misinformation and ignorance that is a fog on the land.

Getting to the core problem and trying to find realistic and effective solutions can be difficult with nontrivial problems. Adding ideological barriers to solutions can add significantly to the difficulty in creating effective solutions. J.R. Dunn talks about Liberalism and Mass Shootings. He looks at gun-free zones, criminal background checks, affirmative action, and mental health reforms to show how each has contributed and how ideology has inhibited solution.

“Clearly, liberalism is far more deeply implicated in the problem of gun crime, including mass shootings, than anyone is willing to admit. There’s no point in sitting around grumbling about this — it’s all of piece with the liberal culture of denial inculcated since preschool. Instead, use this information. Too often 2nd Amendment advocates merely defend gun ownership. The best defense is a good offense. Make them explain why these atrocities always seem to occur in their bailiwicks, under the protection of their rules and laws, and by the hands of their protected classes — lunatics or select social or religious oddities. That will be enough to throw them off their stride before they can erupt into their customary tantrums. They might even forget to mention the mighty AR-15.”

Another indicator is the ruckus about the Senate web site explanation of the 2nd ammendment and how it ignores SCOTUS decisions. It is like an alcoholic who hasn’t yet come to grips he has a problem with booze. That is why suggestions to have the left ‘explain’ or to try to use facts and reality are rather useless. Confrontation with reality has its place but the alcoholic still has to accept his problem before any progress can be made.

Going all the way back to Waco and Janet Reno, Bob Bar shows that Uncle Sam Sucker Punched By Lois Lerner is an insidious cancer on society.

“The message thus transmitted to other federal employees who might in the future consider improperly injecting politics into their official duties is: You may have to suffer a degree of public humiliation, but in the end, you’ll be paid everything due you and no adverse action will befall you. Just clam up, wait out the storm, and things will be fine.”
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“Ironically, the federal government is a victim in all this. As an institution, our government relies on the citizens’ perception that it operates fairly and transparency in upholding the laws of the land. When that credibility is eroded – as it assuredly has been in recent months – so too is the willingness of citizens to respect and obey the laws of the land. Citizens fairly will ask – as did many when former President Clinton escaped punishment in the Senate – “Why should we obey the law when the government and our leaders do not have to?”

When a political party blocks justice for partisan reasons, the harm done is to what the party exists to do. If there is no government or no opposition then there is no reason for a party. Partisan efforts to inhibit investigation or even to avoid final judgment of wrongdoing, as Barr describes, is self destructive. The only problem for the rest of us is that of just how long it will take. From watching socialist and communist countries we know it can take a long time of growing misery, suffering, and death before it comes to a head.

Out of the blue, the government attacks. DEHKO: Bullied by the IRS is the tale of an Iraqi immigrant and his grocery store. The IRS seized his bank account because he made frequent cash deposits. That is suspicious as it can be an indication of money laundering. For the grocery store, it was a means to keep cash on hand down to insurable levels.

“The IRS has turned my American Dream into a nightmare. … Remarkably, the government doesn’t even have to charge me with any wrongdoing to keep my money. Many people know about criminal forfeiture, which allows police to seize the ill-gotten gains of convicted criminals. In my case, the government used civil forfeiture, which lets the government take money from people who have never been charged with any crime.

Adding insult to injury, federal civil forfeiture law does not even grant me a hearing before or soon after they snatched my account. They’ve had my money for 10 months. I’ve been forced to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers just to get a hearing before a judge. Even more bizarre, under civil forfeiture, the government’s case is not against me, but against my property. This is why the official case has the ridiculous name, United States of America v. $35,651.11 in U.S. Currency. This is not just absurd; it’s unconstitutional.”

Find something ‘suspicious’ and then confiscate the involved assets. Some jurisdictions are using this scheme as a fund raising method in lieu of taxation. It has become a racket, a government shakedown of citizens, a destroyer of businesses and lives.

The list grows. Jeffrey Scott Shapiro describes how High-profile cases show a pattern of misuse of prosecutorial powers

“last week’s reversals in the cases of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and five New Orleans police officers are part of a troubling pattern reminiscent of the Soviet criminal justice system — a system in which the state is always right, even when it is wrong.

In both cases, the judges who overturned the original trial-court verdicts cited instances of prosecutorial overzealousness and abuse of power, making the two cases the latest high-profile trials to run aground on the basis of misconduct by the state’s attorneys.”

Complex laws that can be subject to interpretation do not help on this issue.

This is another issue where the ‘both sides do it’ excuse doesn’t fit reality. There is a bias that leans heavily in one direction. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be after you some day.

Another bites the dust. Tom DeLay Exonerated: You Heard It Here First says John Hinderaker.

The misuse of the judicial system and other parts of the government for political purposes may start to worry some folks. Maybe, some day, enough folks.

Can you choose your clients? It appears the government says no. Greenfield notes a recent decision where the Court Rules Christian Photographers Must “Compromise their Religious Values” for Gay Wedding.

“Why must we “compromise our values” to accommodate clashing values. Why can’t the people acting out their imaginary wedding compromise their values instead by leaving photographers who don’t want their business alone?

Why is the need of two lesbians to have a wedding photographers more compelling than Freedom of Religion?”

The lesbians found another photographer but filed a complaint against the one who declined to provide service. The judge ruled that the complaint was valid and photographers cannot decline to serve clients because of religious reasons. What that means is that the idea thaat “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free expression thereof” (1st ammendment to the U.S. Constitution) is quite restricted. It is not only egregious practice in the name of religion, such as human sacrifice or such things, that can be subject to law, it is now the simple matter of choosing with whom one does business. Congress has defined protected classes and they have a status that supercedes the Constitution according to this judge.

The idea that some folks are more equal than others has been in the news a lot lately.

The WSJ took a look at the controversy centered on a Duncan, OK story. They note that “part of the story is what didn’t happen.” The attempt this time is to divert the attention to the tools and not the perps.

“it would almost be a relief if we could blame such a murder on guns.

Then we wouldn’t have to focus on a culture that produces teenagers for whom the prospect of shooting an innocent man in the back on a Friday evening apparently raised not a scintilla of conscience. That is the deeper tragedy, and the real scandal, of too much of American life. ”

“For ‘the Fun of It’” is the topic. Race on this one was there but not at the core. Stand your ground or self defense issues are not at play. Even rivalries, revenge or such motives are not at play, either. It was a drive by shooting by teens who just didn’t think that killing someone was of any consequence.

“That is also an issue of far greater consequence to the future of young black men than the acquittal of George Zimmerman in his awful showdown with Trayvon. If only Mr. Sharpton and his fellow black leaders paid attention to what was missing in the lives of those three teenagers. Maybe President Obama would even care to use it as one of his teachable moments. ”

There is denial – Beckel provided an example by dragging up a gun tragedy that was so inane it could be used to suggest outlawing backyard pools – there is avoidance – anything but a hard look at teens without a moral grounding and what else they are missing. Therein like the tragedy and the consequence.

NAPOLITANO: Zimmerman’s double jeopardy dilemma — There’s a similar judicial miscarriage now underway in New York City.  The SCOTUS tosses one conviction on an “inane” law so the prosecution has to figure out another way to ‘get their man.’ no matter what.

“As a result of that ruling, a Manhattan federal appeals court threw out Mr. Bruno’s conviction. In a fair world, that would be the end of his ordeal. However, the Obama Department of (political) Justice obtained an indictment against Mr. Bruno based upon the same set of facts that had formed the allegations of a violation of the honest services statute, but which it now claims constitutes bribery. The feds did this even though they had told the federal judge in the first trial nearly a dozen times that the state senator had not committed bribery and even though the witnesses who testified for the government in the first trial uniformly stated when asked that Mr. Bruno had not been bribed.”

Hoping you won’t become a target and can keep your distance often isn’t enough. Accountability is needed to keep the government in check. That can be difficult to do if one party is in lockstep defense of such over-reach and abuse of power as is evidenced in current legislative committee hearings.

Althouse reacts: “Why are black boys expendable?” is the heartwrenching question on the front page at the Washington Post.

“I think our society demonstrated great care toward Trayvon Martin, even to the point of putting Zimmerman through a trial that should not have happened. That is, it was an excess of care for Martin, a bending-over-backwards to show that we care about Martin and all the young men he was seen to represent. And now, after an extensive, careful trial, and a jury verdict that clearly hewed to well-honed instructions about evidence and burden of proof, you still want to use it to assert that we don’t care. If that’s the kind of conversation we get when we try to respond to the invitation to have a conversation, can you see why it’s something we avoid?”

The lack of intellectual integrity in the prosecution was bad enough. The rationalizing is something else. Then there’s the DoJ effort to find something, anything, to invoke double jepardy. It is ugly. Very ugly.

As one pundit noted, you can tell where on the political spectrum a person is by whether they say Zimmerman was in pursuit of Martin or whether he was just watching Martin. This also shows up in stories that assert that Zimmerman was wrong to get out of his truck to ‘pursue’ or ‘watch’ because that is what lead to the tragedy.

What has been missing in the public discussion is Martin’s role in what he did wrong and what he should not have done. Some of these would be: he should have just gone directly home from the convenience store rather than wander around looking at houses in the dark; he should have spent the four minutes getting inside rather than waiting to jump Zimmerman; he should have simply asked Zimmerman what he was doing and then gone home; he should not have jumped Zimmerman (in the manner he bragged about in his telephone messages).

Another behavior to look for is the ‘both sides at fault’ rationalization. That requires equating the Zimmerman watch or pursuit with the Martin house browsing and assault as equivalent in moral and ethical terms.

Extrapolation, especially for minimization, is another behavior to observe. Bob Beckel provides a case study in extrapolation a self defense during an assault with a bar fight and another ‘expert’ who suggested the brawl was like a schoolyard fight. The ideas here boil down to dismissing any basis that self defense might be required, especially self defense with a gun. People being mugged should just accept it? Being mugged is the same as a bar fight or the fight between a couple of kids on the school yard? You are supposed to take careful inventory of your injuries and forecast potential future behavior of the guy beating you up before you decide how to respond?

The implications are also worth considering. A neighborhood watch is an organized adjuct to the police efforts. The idea is that the members of a neighborhood will watch out for each other so burglars, vandals, and other criminals will know they have a higher risk of being caught. That means that suspicious behavior is noted and that those expressing that behavior will not disappear before the police can check it out.

The implications for self defense are also significant. Does the girl crossing campus after a late class need to just submit to assault? Or can she carry a weapon to defend herself? Should gangs be able to attack without any concern that they might be met with deadly force?

It is the neighborhoods where the citizens cower, where the don’t get out of the truck to let potential criminals know they are being watched, that have the biggest crime problem. It is the people who are not able to exercise self defense that end up being killed or beaten to a pulp. Those uncomfortable with Zimmerman’s efforts for his neighborhood should consider the alternative.