harmonicminer

San Francisco (like Santa Monica, and others) is a “sanctuary city” with regard to illegal aliens, meaning that its city council voted in 1989 “not to cooperate with federal immigration investigations”. In other words, there is a city ordinance to break federal law, and obstruct justice, and, incredibly, the federal government puts up with it, mostly. Now the city is actually buying plane tickets and escorting criminal illegal aliens out of the country, to avoid federal investigations. Continue reading “SF City officials on lam with illegal alien criminals”

This looks like it will be a fine complement to Peter Wood’s book, discussed here. As chapters of Purdy’s book are released, I’ll link to them here.

New Book on Diversity to be serialized on line

Today, Larry Purdy—one of the three lawyers from the Minneapolis law firm Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand who represented Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter in the U.S. Supreme Court cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger—presents a picture of the upside down house in which we live. His book, Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”, shows how racial preferences have engendered an upside down view of race, racism, affirmative action, diversity, and justice.

The National Association of Scholars is privileged to present, beginning today, an advanced look at Purdy’s book. A printed version of Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity” will be available later this year. In the days and weeks to come, however, we will serialize this important book on our website. Each chapter will go up in PDF form until the whole book is present. We do this with the author’s permission. Mr. Purdy retains the copyright to Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity” and all legal claims to his intellectual property.

In the preface, Purdy names the three purposes of his book: First, he sets out to refute another book, The Shape of the River (1998) by William Bowen and Derek Bok, former presidents of Princeton and Harvard. Bowen and Bok’s book strenuously argued that racial preferences in elite colleges work as advertised: the minority students who receive the preferences thrive; the colleges benefit; and society is better off. In her majority opinion, Justice O’Connor relied heavily on the arguments put forth by Bowen and Bok in The Shape of the River, and yet, until now, no one has systematically examined their arguments and so-called “evidence.”

Second, Purdy critiques Justice O’Connor’s opinion in Grutter. Purdy is certainly not the first to do this. Grutter is notorious for its loose reasoning and selective use of evidence, but there is probably no one better equipped than Purdy to demonstrate the waywardness of O’Connor’s judgment in this case.

Purdy’s third object in this book is to discuss the continued use of racial preferences in higher education and the injustices those preferences propagate. Ultimately, Purdy writes, both the “beneficiaries” and the “victims” are harmed—by condescension and by discrimination.

The New York Times has admitted that there is an international oil shortage! Really. Twice in one article!

Continue reading “NYTimes admits oil shortage! Sing hallelujah!”

In the sort of move that never happens (at least publicly) in the kinds of nations who oppose the USA, the US Army is about to release a comprehensive self-study on problems with the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq.

The Left would have us believe that the Iraq war and the aftermath have been uniquely bad in US history. While it’s true that the military and civilian authorities underestimated the problems, and misjudged their options (see previous post on groupthink), it’s also true that this has happened in pretty much every war that was ever fought. The truism that “generals always prepare to fight the last war” was not invented last year. By definition, wars are almost always fought badly, and end worse, cost more, and are more complicated to get finished with than anyone hopes.

Continue reading “Only in an open society: the Army shares its self-study”

Just to begin with the usual disclaimer in this discussion: even if you think the war in Iraq was an error from the beginning, you still must deal with the reality we face now. We’re there. After very hard times, some of which could certainly have been avoided, things are looking up.

Grown-ups don’t make policy based on woulda/coulda/shoulda and “let’s pull out and show those darn neo-cons what a disaster they’ve created”. Grown-ups look with clear eyes at the situation as it is and say, “What do we do now?”

Maybe we shouldn’t have bought this particular property on an adjustable rate mortgage, and the monthly bill has been higher than we hoped, but do we declare bankruptcy? Or do some creative financing and restructuring? Or just stick with it, since the worst times seem to be over, and rates are coming down?

Max Boot, writing in Commentary on the complaints of Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and others about Boot’s comparison of Germany, Japan, etc., to Iraq, with regard to how long we’ll have to keep troops there after major fighting is done:

Lots of people couldn’t imagine when we first intervened in the former Yugoslavia that our troops would stay there for years and that they would not be violently contested. But that is, in fact, what’s happened. Obviously there are major differences between the Balkans and Iraq, which Sullivan and Marshall can no doubt cite ad nauseam. But those deployments also show the kind of long-term role that U.S. troops can play.

The broader point is that the success of American military interventions has usually been closely related to their length. The longer we stay, the more successful we are. When we get out too quickly–as we did in Haiti in the 1990’s–the situation often goes to hell. So if we want to secure a lasting victory in Iraq we need to stay around for a good long while.

But I get the sense that Marshall and Sullivan, like many of their antiwar compatriots, don’t really care about whether we win or lose in Iraq. They simply want to get out, and damn the consequences. That brings up another historical analogy that I’m sure they would rather forget: the way we pulled out of South Vietnam after the defeat of the North’s Tet and Easter Offensives when a decent outcome (namely the long-term preservation of South Vietnam’s independence) was within our grasp. A lot of antiwar voices back then said it would actually be good for the locals if we left, just as they now say it would be good for Iraq if we skedaddled. Tell it to the Vietnamese boat people or the victims of the Cambodian killing fields.

It’s worth reading all of it, and reading Boot’s original thoughts as well.

Obama can claim his righteous foresight and ideological purity about the Iraq war all he wants, but that still doesn’t make him the person to manage our current situation. He seems more interested in acting out on his righteous indignation than making sound policy based on the realities we face. We can only hope that, if he wins, his advisers will gradually move him away from extreme, preemptive withdrawal that will throw away everything the surge has gained.

I hope his policy, if elected, will be something more than a childish, “I TOLD you so, and now I’m going to show YOU!”

President TrainingWheels, indeed, if that is the case.

I hope he reads Michael Yon’s book.

hat tip: Powerline

Michael Yon is former special forces soldier turned war journalist, and author of the very important book, Moment of Truth in Iraq.

He has a dispatch up, titled On Joe Galloway, ostensibly about another journalist, but it covers so much ground, and works on so many levels, that I think it’s worth reading in full. It is ostensibly about the use of torture to get intelligence from terrorists and suspects, but it’s really about a great deal more. It’s really about how we make decisions, how we validate our ideas, where we get our ideas, and why we do what’s right. Though he generally supports the aims of the Iraq war, he is no blinkered ideologue. A sampling:

Continue reading “You have to want to know the truth, and you have to do what’s right”

From Hugh Hewitt’s Blog:

From the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of a National Academy of Sciences meeting underway in D.C.:

It is a grim, almost unthinkable scenario: a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, smuggled into the United States, is detonated in a major U.S. city, perhaps even the Bay Area.

Top federal officials and medical experts gathered in Washington on Thursday to consider this nightmare vision. Their conclusion: Cities and states are frightfully ill-prepared for dealing with an attack using a small nuclear bomb.

“Few of them have coordinated response plans for the aftermath of nuclear terrorism,” said Brooke Buddemeier, a specialist in the radiological and nuclear counter-measures division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “There is a general lack of understanding of the response needs and uncertainty over federal, state and local roles and responsibilities.”

Federal officials are worried enough to have convened a National Academy of Sciences committee on medical preparedness for a nuclear attack by terrorists. The panel is holding its first two-day meeting in Washington this week.

The presentations got specific:

The committee began its first session with a ghastly overview of what a 10-kiloton nuclear blast would look like: If detonated at the White House, it could destroy virtually every building within 1,500 yards. People in an area out to 1.55 miles could suffer second-degree burns, while others would be injured by flying debris and shattered windows. Those 4.5 to 7.5 miles away could suffer momentary “flash” blindness, causing traffic accidents.

A lethal plume of radioactive material would, depending on winds, stretch as far as 9 miles, affecting up to 300,000 people, although injuries would depend on a person’s exposure to radiation.

“It’s not just about radiation exposure,” Buddemeier said. Many of the injured would have shards of glass in their eyes, ruptured eardrums and other impact injuries from the blast’s shock waves.

Read the whole thing and understand that there are millions of people who go to sleep every night and dream of such a scenario –and take pleasure in it.

Good Lord. I don’t usually quote an entire post of someone else, but: Good Lord.

The 2008 elections are not just about health care and the economy, or even the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Which of our candidates do YOU want running the show? Which one do YOU think is likely to know more about this threat, and be highly focused on doing something about it?

This is no time for a President on training wheels.

I wrote earlier on the problems of “universal health care”, or pretty much any heavily regulated or government funded health care scheme, which inevitably leads to rationing. That is, while we can find cases in free market systems where people won’t get care, through no fault of their own, we’re foolish to ignore the fact that in government run systems, which will of necessity be rationed, there will also be people who suffer for lack of care.

Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, David Gratzer gives the lowdown on the Canadian experiment with socialized medical care. Claude Castonguay was perhaps the most powerful driving voice behind Canada’s adoption of government run healthcare.

Castonguay’s evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform …..

The government followed his advice…. until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.” [emphasis mine]

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance. [emphasis mine]

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced. [emphasis mine]

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor. [emphasis mine]

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires’ case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn’t properly filled out a form. At death’s door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

Read the whole thing.

The facts of economic life are these:

1) When governments engage in any form of price fixing, whether it is intervention in the market by fiat, or wholesale takeover of a sector of the economy, shortages will result. Period. No credible economist denies this. But politicians, or populist/progressive politicians, at any rate, would like to pretend that they can repeal the laws of economics whenever they think they see a good reason (that is, one that will help them get elected or stay in office).

2) No one, absolutely no one, nor any conceivable consortium of geniuses, is able to centrally plan a health care system that is more humane, supplying more health care to more people in a timely way, than the one now in the USA. The very best in the world have tried… and they have failed, pretty much without exception.

3) The US government’s interventions in the health care market, and earlier in wage fixing (in WWII, which led to our entire system of employer provided health insurance, which hid the true costs of health care from the users of it, and, along with Medicare, led directly to our current price spiral), is the single biggest factor in the high health care prices in the USA. But at least we don’t have serious shortages, mostly…. yet.

All of which leads to:

4) The government can only make things worse by further regulation, and most especially by dreaming up more plans that involve taking money from some people in the form of taxes to pay for the health care of others.

As Lazarus Long said (more or less… I didn’t take time to look up the exact quote), “No one ever learns anything from other people’s experience.”

He was wrong, of course, because some people clearly do. But it certainly seems to apply to governments, in spades.

Maybe most people can sing a song….or maybe the researchers are tone-deaf

Despite the hilarity of early-season “American Idol” episodes, nearly everyone can carry a tune, new research shows.

Of those who can’t, there are two types – those that know they sound bad and those that think they sound fine.

OK, I admit it… I’m in that last category.

Muhammad married a girl of six, and consummated the marriage when she was nine. I know, someone will say that standards were different then, and modern sensibilities do not apply. But this is still law in Islamic countries. (video at the link)

Clip Transcript

Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi, a Saudi marriage officiant, which aired on LBC TV on June 19, 2008:

Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: Marriage is actually two things: First we are talking about the marriage contract itself. This is one thing, while consummating the marriage – having sex with the wife for the first time – is another thing. There is no minimal age for entering marriage. You can have a marriage contract even with a one-year-old girl, not to mention a girl of nine, seven, or eight. This is merely a contract [indicating] consent. The guardian in such a case must be the father, because the father’s opinion is obligatory. Thus, the girl becomes a wife… But is the girl ready for sex or not? What is the appropriate age for having sex for the first time? This varies according to environment and traditions. In Yemen, girls are married off at nine, ten, eleven, eight, or thirteen, while in other countries, they are married off at 16. Some countries have legislated laws forbidding having sex before the girl is eighteen.

[...]

The Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow. He took ‘Aisha to be his wife when she was six, but he had sex with her only when she was nine.

Interviewer: When she was six…

Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: He married her at the age of six, and he consummated the marriage, by having sex with her for the first time, when she was nine. We consider the Prophet Muhammad to be our model.

Interviewer: My question to you is whether the marriage of a 12-year-old boy with an 11-year-old girl is a logical marriage, which is permitted by Islamic law.

Dr. Ahmad Al-Mu’bi: If the guardian is the father… There are two different types of guardianship. If the guardian is the father, and he marries his daughter off to a man of appropriate standing, the marriage is obviously valid.

[...]

People find themselves in all kinds of circumstances. Take, for example, a man who has two, three, or four daughters. He does not have any wives, but he needs to go on a trip. Isn’t it better to marry his daughter to a man, who will protect and sustain her, and when she reaches the proper age, he will have sex with her? Who says all men are ferocious wolves?

Ah… now I feel better about it, since he explained that not all men are ferocious wolves. In Islamic countries, child rapists DO get the death penalty… unless they are married to the child, of course, in which case multiple rape is a conjugal duty.

She has the look of the mouse watching the snake, unable to escape from the cage in which she has been placed with the predator. From Spiegel Online:

There are people who will look at this image and be able to continue with business as usual — without disgust, nausea and rage. We are beholding the fiercest barbarism imaginable. But a carefree cultural relativism — which this age has donned as its outward manifestation of decadent indifference — allows many to simply look away. They turn away from the sight of an 11-year-old girl, who is about to be raped by the man sitting next to her.

Diversity is a wonderful thing. We should invite the happy couple to the USA, and give them the honeymoon suite at a nice five star hotel, just to help them get started right.

Technorati Tags: Islam, child marriage

How many people understand that we were one vote from losing the Bill of Rights in the Constitution? That if judges could simply decide the words don’t mean what they say, and what they plainly meant at the time they were written, then the words mean nothing whatsoever, and the law is simply what some black-robed oligarchs decide it means?

Randy Barnett, writing in the Wall Street Journal: News Flash: The Constitution Means What It Says

Justice Scalia’s opinion is the finest example of what is now called “original public meaning” jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court. This approach stands in sharp contrast to Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissenting opinion that largely focused on “original intent” – the method that many historians employ to explain away the text of the Second Amendment by placing its words in what they call a “larger context.” Although original-intent jurisprudence was discredited years ago among constitutional law professors, that has not stopped nonoriginalists from using “original intent” – or the original principles “underlying” the text – to negate its original public meaning.

Of course, the originalism of both Justices Scalia’s and Stevens’s opinions are in stark contrast with Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion, in which he advocates balancing an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. Guess which wins out in the balancing? As Justice Scalia notes, this is not how we normally protect individual rights, and was certainly not how Justice Breyer protected the individual right of habeas corpus in the military tribunals case decided just two weeks ago.

So what larger lessons does Heller teach? First, the differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same.

We should also seek to get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions or “precedents” that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text. This shows why elections matter – especially presidential elections – and why we should vet our politicians to see if they appreciate how the Constitution ought to be interpreted.

This all swung on a single vote. Imagine if the vote had been on “free speech” or “freedom of assembly” or “freedom of religion”? A 5-4 ruling would have been terrifying in its implications for our nation. It should be unanimous that the Constitution’s plain wording means what it says.

The Left wants desperately to pack the Court for the next generation during an Obama presidency. To the Left, specific issues they care about are more important than our nation’s fundamental character as a constitutional republic.

So I am happy at the outcome. And I am terrified of what could have been, and may well still be.

hat tip: addisonrd

N.Y. Wants All Bronx Adults Tested for HIV

Community-based organizations, hospitals, and health clinics throughout New York City will voluntarily test every adult resident between the ages of 18-64 living in the Bronx for HIV, The New York Times reports.

The decision, announced by The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, comes on the heels of a recent report which shows New York City residents have the highest rate of practicing unsafe sex, and one of the highest HIV rates in the United States.

The Bronx, the report shows, has been hit especially hard.

In 2005, an estimated 250,000 Bronx residents aged 18–64 had never been tested for HIV, and one in four people with HIV did not know they were infected. The report also shows that one out of every four people that found out they were HIV-positive also found out they had full-blown AIDS at the same time.
………………….

“The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population,” explains Futterman, who helped develop the program for the city.

Simply unbelievable.  It’s a brave new world.

The Supreme Court has decided that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution DOES apply to individuals, and is not some kind of group right, dependent on membership in a militia, etc.

Unbelievably, Obama claims he agrees!

So, let’s see:  out of the last three major decisions of the Supreme Court, Obama agreed with the “conservatives” in two out of three decisions.  These include both Roberts and Alito, both of whom Obama voted against in the Senate confirmation process.

The court wants Guantanamo inmates to have full habeas corpus rights.  Obama agrees with the left leaning judges.

The court decides not to let states execute child rapists, no matter how egregious the crime.  Obama sides with the “constructionists”, not the left leaning judges.

The court decides that handgun, rifle and shotgun ownership is a constitutional right, and Obama, despite previous posititions he has taken, now says he agrees with the “constructionists”, i.e., that gun ownership is an individual right, not with the left leaning judges (presumably he is still for high levels of restrictions…  he’s not saying much about it right now….  needs to get elected first).

So what can we say this means regarding Obama’s judicial philosophy?  He seems to be agreeing with the judges he voted against, more than he disagrees with them.  Does this mean he would appoint more judges like Roberts and Alito, as opposed to Ginsburg and Souter?

Nah…  it just means he wants to get elected, and will say anything to avoid offending what he regards as key voter groups.

Will the lefty media (meaning nearly all the networks and major newspapers) ask him any hard questions about why he seems to be agreeing with judges he opposed?  You’re kidding, right?

Obama voted against John Roberts as Chief Justice, saying:

…while adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or
constitutional construction will dispose of 95 percent of the cases
that come before a court, so that both a Scalia and a Ginsburg will
arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of the
cases — what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases
that are truly difficult. In those cases, adherence to precedent and
rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the
25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the
basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader
perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s
empathy.

For Obama, what it boils down to is this: judges should vote with their feelings when they don’t personally like the outcome produced by the law and the Constitution. He wants judges to legislate. So he wants judges who share his feelings. For him, the appropriate question for a judicial nominee is, “How do you feel about….” Fill in the blank.

Further, his characterization of only 5% hard cases is ridiculous on its face. Cases don’t usually even make it to SCOTUS unless they are hard cases. The Court doesn’t take very many cases that are simple and easy; instead, it lets the rulings of lower courts stand. And he’s wildly wrong in suggesting that Ginzberg and Scalia agree 95% of the time. Does he have anyone doing research on things like this before he opens his mouth?

Obama voted against Sam Alito, saying:

…when you look at his record, what is clear is that when it comes to his
understanding of the Constitution, he consistently sides on behalf of
the powerful against the powerless. If there is a case involving an
employer and an employee, and the Supreme Court has not given clear
direction, Judge Alito will rule in favor of the employer. If there is
a claim between prosecutors and defendants, if the Supreme Court has
not already a clear rule of decision then, Judge Alito will rule in
favor of the state. When it comes to how checks and balances in our
system are supposed to operate, the balance of power between the
executive branch, Congress, and the judiciary, Judge Alito consistently
sides with the notion that a president should not be constrained by
either Congressional acts, or the check of the judiciary. He believes
in the overarching power of the president to engage in whatever the
president deems to be appropriate policy.

His commentary on Roberts (at the link above) makes a similar point: he thinks that judges should be prejudiced towards “the weak” and against “the powerful”. That is, of course, unless we’re talking about the very, very, very weakest among us, who, in Obama’s jurisprudence, will never make it to court at all.

And now, Obama agrees with the judges he voted against

Democrat Barack Obama said Wednesday he disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing executions of people who rape children, a crime he said states have the right to consider for capital punishment.

“I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes,” Obama said at a news conference. “I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution.”

The court’s 5-4 decision Wednesday struck down a Louisiana law that allows capital punishment for people convicted of raping children under 12, saying it violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling spares the only people in the U.S. under sentence of death for that crime — two Louisiana men convicted of raping girls 5 and 8. It also invalidates laws on the books in five other states that allowed executions for child rape that does not result in the death of the victim.

Obama, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, said that had the court “said we want to constrain the abilities of states to do this to make sure that it’s done in a careful and appropriate way, that would have been one thing. But it basically had a blanket prohibition and I disagree with that decision.”

Obama has two daughters, ages 7 and 9.

But wait: those judges against the death penalty for even the most egregious child-rape cases were following a higher law, that “life” is more important than “justice” when no life was actually taken in the crime. They said so. Surely Obama wanted the powerless child-rapists (probably mostly poor, lower class citizens) to be defended against the powerful prosecutors?

Don’t look for Obama to apologize for voting against Roberts and Alito, even though they are the ones with whom he now pretends to agree.

This entire sorry episode reveals what many of us already know about Obama: he is no deep thinker, he has no serious understanding of complex issues, he is completely willing to pretend anything at all to be elected, and he won’t be able to stick to his guns when a hard decision needs to be made. He knows this “let the child-rapists live” judgment goes against the grain for a large majority of the electorate, so he rushes to get on “the right side” of it, knowing that his left-leaning fans will wink and nod, accepting the political necessity.

The left has no fear of what kinds of judges a President Obama would appoint. He would appoint judges who would make many more very bad decisions, exactly like this one. And that says it all, about a great many things.

Offered in the spirit of simplification for people who need that. It really is this simple.

The problem then

Saddam violated his parole agreement (from the 1991 Gulf War resulting from his invasion of Kuwait, and threatened invasion of Saudi Arabia). He kept taking potshots at the sheriff’s deputies, all the while claiming he was unarmed, yet still making threats, and hanging out with the criminal element. He was known to be engaged in several criminal conspiracies. He was for sure planning to steal a couple of ranches if he could get away with it.

While the politicians dithered (nearly every one of them from every nation was sure Saddam was busting parole left and right, but half of them were on the take) and the district attorney couldn’t decide what the charges might be after the arrest without seeing more evidence, the USA formed a posse because we had probable cause on a weapons charge (besides current witnesses, he had lots of priors… rapsheet as long as your arm) and frisked Saddam and sent him to jail. He turned out not to be so tough, and in fact didn’t have all the ammo he’d advertised.

It was still a righteous bust, because the perp had clearly violated parole any number of times, and had even bigger plans. In the meantime, more witnesses came forward to testify to Saddam’s previous crimes and he was lawfully tried and punished. Some of Saddam’s gang were still around making trouble, and they allied with a gang from out of town to fight a rival gang. (It was pretty much like fighting the Crips and the Bloods and MS13 all at once… think horsethieves, cattle rustlers and cold-blooded killers.) Though it took awhile, the posse finally figured out how to deal with the various gangs, with some help from the local authorities. Some of the gang members were offered immunity to testify against even worse gang-bangers. There are reports that some of the locals took the law into their own hands in rough and ready frontier justice… regrettable, but probably inevitable. Horse thieves have often been hanged without benefit of judge and jury, when caught riding the horse with the original saddle.

Things have settled down some now. The locals are doing better and better at dealing with the gangs, both local and out of town. They’ve requested that the posse stick around long enough to be sure the situation is stabilized.

The problem now

Unfortunately, some sneaky city-slickers have been trying to convince everyone that the posse should come home, even though the locals want the posse to stick around a while, and everyone knows they aren’t quite ready to handle the gangs on their own yet, though that day is definitely coming. These same city-slicker con artists are claiming that the original posse was sent by a lying Sheriff, who didn’t really have probable cause or a search warrant, when everybody thought that Saddam had even more dangerous weapons and even bigger plans for more... which he definitely did. And it’s pretty sure that some of what he had will never be found, due to fast action when he knew the Sheriff was coming.

Dang city-slicker con artists… most of ‘em are, no kidding, lawyers and pantywaist scribblers and script readers, who actually think they know something. The only thing they know is how to pull the wool over the eyes of decent folk by lying to them constantly… and offering them bribes of all kinds to keep ‘em quiet. Sadly, some otherwise good people take the bribes and look the other way.

Clear eyed, level headed folk aren’t fooled by these guys. There are some decent people who think maybe the arrest was premature (I’m not one of them), but nobody with any sense wants to turn the gangs loose again. I suppose it’s easier for these patent medicine quacks and carpet-baggers to ignore the resulting crime spree and murder rampage because it’ll be somebody else’s kids getting killed in shootouts and ambushes… at first, anyway. What goes around comes around.

And these bunko-frauds claim the moral high-ground (all the while trying to get the public sold on pyramid schemes of all kinds that our kids will be paying for when we’re dead and gone). I’ve seen fake faith-healers in tent revivals with better morals than these guys.

I’m pinning my hopes on more of those guys who were in the posse, coming home on rotation, and setting these swindlers straight… And in the spirit of praying for those who spitefully use us, I’m praying for a little Damascus Road Experience for these snake oil salesmen…. complete with searchlights from heaven and loud voices telling ‘em what for.

Don’t be fooled by fancy talk. Vote for the good guys. They’re the ones not lyin’ to ya about what’s goin’ on now, or what’ll happen if they get their way.

UPDATE:  Just to avoid confusion, one of the candidates was kidnapped by another gang some years back.  He knows what’s like to deal with tough times, and crooked hombres, as opposed to just having some for your friends.  Vote for that guy.