St. Paul attorney John Gilmore, who represents former Bachmann chief of staff Andy Parrish, also confirmed that his client is among those being interviewed by the FBI as a witness. “Andy Parrish has been contacted by the FBI for purposes of an interview,” Gilmore said. “That has been set up for next week and Mr. Parrish will cooperate fully.” . . .
. . .One source familiar with the FBI inquiry said an agent from the bureau’s public integrity section expressed interest in campaign finance allegations contained in a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint brought by whistleblower Peter Waldron, a Florida pastor who worked on the Bachmann presidential campaign in Iowa.
. . . In an affidavit to the Iowa Senate earlier this month, [Iowa State Senator Kent] Sorenson denied being paid directly or indirectly by any “Bachmann entities.” That contradicts an earlier affidavit from Parrish describing an “arrangement” to pay Sorenson through Short’s company. Parrish’s affidavit said Bachmann was aware of the arrangement, but thought it was legal. . . .
Read it and weep at the Star Tribune
Bluestem is curious about the status of Bachmann's seat should the investigations mature. As readers may recall, Bachmann barely won in the 2012 election, beating DFL challenger Jim Graves by 4,296 votes in a district where Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney received nearly 6 percentage points of the vote than she.
We've heard and read rumors that many Republicans wish she would retire. That set Bluestem to wondering how the GOP could find a candidate who isn't a client of John Gilmore. Perhaps Tom Emmer would be interested in the job.
The council approved the ordinance in a 4-1 vote on March 20. The purpose of the measure:
It is the purpose of this Section to provide the residents of the City
protection from invasions of privacy due to the rapid implementation of
drone technology being put into use by individuals, entities, and law
enforcement agencies. Use of unmanned aerial vehicles also pose an
unreasonable public safety concern to other aircraft or objects in the
air, and to City residents and their property on the ground in the event
of drone malfunction, loss of control, or other inability to sustain
flight as intended.
The ordinance allows landowners to fly drones without surveillance capacities over their own property. Law enforcement must obtain warrants to use drones, although they can use them in situations when "immediate danger of death or serious injury to any person" would predicate the use of a surveillance drone.
Even as the St. Bonifacius City Council was developing its ordinance, Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky conducted a 13-hour filibuster forcing the government to state its policy on use of drones.
The drone technology boggles the mind. Some say that these unmanned “snoops” equipped with sensors can tell how many people are in a structure. It’s even possible that by involving other technologies, the drone could eavesdrop on a conversation.
Like the St. Bonifacius City Council, the American Civil Liberties Union is also concerned about the lack of safeguards while using this “big brother in the sky.”
The St. Bonifacius City Council said neither the federal government nor the State of Minnesota have provided reasonable legal restrictions on the use of drones. That’s why St. Bonifacius leaders believe taking the time and spending the money on its anti-drone ordinance is worth it, even if it’s coming from one of the metropolitan area’s smallest communities.
Photo: This Global Hawk is so not allowed in St. Boni. An RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft like the
one shown is currently flying non-military mapping missions over South,
Central America and the Caribbean at the request of partner nations in
the region. U.S. Air Force photo by Bobbi Zapka. via Wikicommons.
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In November 2010, Bluestem received a tip that a man who had been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a girl repeatedly--and this individual had been given a pardon extraordinary by the state board of pardons.
His original crime? The statutory rape of a fourteen-year old, who he later married. The girl making the 2010 accusations later changed her story and the charges were dropped.
Mankato Free Press crime beat staff writer Dan Neinabor reports that man's son, Jonathan Giefer, has now been convicted of sexually assaulting a girl under 13. In Judge rules Vernon Center teen assaulted girl, he writes:
A 17-year-old Vernon Center boy was found guilty in Jackson County
juvenile court of sexually assaulting a girl under the age of 13,
according to documents filed in Blue Earth County District Court.
Jonathan Alan Giefer had been staying at a residence in the Windom area
when the incident took place March 31, 2012, court records say.
Giefer was driving an all-terrain vehicle on trails in the area and
took the victim for a ride into the woods. Someone else who knew Giefer
and was riding another ATV in the same area noticed Giefer’s ATV stopped
running for a short time while he was in the woods.
The victim later told an adult that Giefer had made sexual contact with her in the woods.
Read the details of the case at the Mankato Free Press. Nienabor notes:
The case was moved to Blue Earth County last month because Giefer lives
in Vernon Center. His parents are Jeremy and Susan Giefer, according to
court documents filed because he is a juvenile.
Jeremy Giefer was arrested in November 2010 after a teen girl reported
he had repeatedly sexually assaulted her. A trial that was set to take
place in December 2011 was canceled after the girl changed her story.
The allegations against Jeremy Giefer drew statewide attention because
he had received a pardon from former Gov. Tim Pawlenty for a previous
conviction for sexually assaulting a teenager. One reason cited for
pardoning Giefer, who was 19 when that crime was committed, was that he
later married the victim in that case.
It would be reckless to speculate about the family pathology at this distance. We do hope that his victim receives the help she likely needs.
As for the Giefer family, it's never their fault, apparently:
Jeremy Giefer said Tuesday the charges against his son were blown out of proportion.
"They're doing what they're doing because of me," he said. "They didn't have a case against me, so they went after him."
Update: Worth adding: Jeremy Giefer had been charged with domestic assault for slapping his son across the face so hard that that he was charged with domestic assault. As City Pages Nick Pinto reported in Jeremy Giefer charged with domestic assault before Pawlenty pardon [UPDATE], Giefer the Elder "was able to get the charges of domestic assault and malicious punishment of a child dismissed condition that he go a year without racking up any similar offenses." Go read the 2010 City Pages article.
This family's behavior has become entaggled often enough with social services and law enforcement to suggest that there may be domestic abuse across several generations.
A friend asks what's the word for when gothic becomes rococo? We say "Vernon Center."
Photo: Vernon Center's watertower.
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In the November 2012 election, Representative Bob Barrett (R-Lindstrom) defeated Rick Olseen by fewer than 400 votes, with Barrett earning "10,644 votes, or 50.87 percent. Olseen saw 10,251 ballots cast for him," according to the Forest Lake Times.
We'll never know how much false information circulated by the Barrett campaign contributed to that narrow victory. The flyer--mailed in the last week of the campaign--will cost the Lindstrom Republican $1000.
A panel of three administrative law judges ruled last week that "clear and convincing evidence Barrett and his campaign committee
violated Minnesota Statute 211B.06, and observe the violation of that
statute is a misdemeanor" and slapped a civil fine of $1000 on Barrett and his committee according to Barrett fined for false campaign flyer, ECM staff writer Derrick Knutson's article in the East Central Post Review:
The mailing, sent to voters in newly formed District 32B, among other
statements said that “Bob’s opponent didn’t serve on the Education
committee while a state senator even though our schools need help.”
In fact, Olseen served on the Senate’s Education Policy Committee from 2007-2008. . . .
Barrett was mild as a lamb about the fine when contacted by the ECM papers, Knutson reports:
A three-member panel of judges concluded Barrett and his team
prepared and disseminated false campaign material with reckless
disregard as to whether it was false.
Barrett learned of the panel’s findings Monday and expressed regret in an interview with the Times.
“They’re the experts,” he said. “I respect their decision and apologize to Mr. Olseen.” . . .
“I looked it up and didn’t see his membership, but obviously, according
to the judge, I should have,” Barrett told the Times. “It was an honest
mistake, and shouldn’t have happened…I remember looking and I remember
confirming that particular bullet point, and we were just wrong.” . . .
Earlier, his approach to the OAH panel was somewhat different: accusing Olseen of misusing public resources in filing the complaint (see embedded opinion below):
The Panel also finds troubling Representative Barrett’s suggestion that Mr. Olseen had improper motives in filing this campaign complaint and that he was “using public resources and this judicial process to obtain his personal goal.” Any individual has the right to file a complaint under the Fair Campaign Practices Act if they believe a person or committee has violated a provision of the Act. In this case, Mr. Olseen has established that Representative Barrett and his committee violated Minnesota Statutes § 211B.06 by disseminating false campaign material about him. Mr. Olseen’s complaint is grounded in law and fact and should not be viewed as an inappropriate use of public resources or this administrative process.
That's a good one from the candidate whose campaign couldn't even figure out how to use the very handy Minnesota Legislators Past & Present page kept by the cheerful and professional staff at the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. It's the number two hit on a google keyword search for "Rick Olseen."
Fortunately, Olseen has a new job he's happy with, the papers report--and as a good government guy, he's thinking about the larger need to reform campaign practive law in Minnesota, he tells the ECM papers:
Olseen wonders how the mailing might have affected the voting Nov. 6,
though he is quick to add he is content position as a field
representative for U.S. Congressman Rick Nolan.
Barrett did not recall the document’s mailing list. If it was sizable
and even 1 percent of recipients changed their vote, Olseen said, it
may have been the tipping point in the election that came down to fewer
than 400 votes.
“I think it’s important that elected officials and candidates
understand there’s a responsibility on their part when they put
information out there that’s incorrect,” Olseen said Monday.
He also worries that the punishment is not strong enough to ensure those running for office stand behind all campaign material.
Photo:This meme was still popular when Rick Olseen served on the Senate Education Committee in 2007-2008 (above); Bob Barrett, R-Lindstrom (below), Present Master of Mad Innertube Research Skillz; Bluestem wants to the HRCC to raise funds by staging a research royal rumble on twitter featuring Barrett, Mary Franson, Glenn Gruenhagen, Cindy Pugh and Jim Newberger. Who would fish up the best misinformation?
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With the Legislature proposing several new gun control bills, Quist
has stepped forward to present himself as a strong opponent of the
bills, even traveling to one of the hearings as a show of support. He
said research by John Lott shows that control measures have no impact on
violence. Lott's research since publication has been discredited by
several scientific journals and it has even been accused of fabricating
its facts. He said attention needs to instead be focused on other areas,
such as the correlation between school shooters and violent video
games.
"We really need to see if we can do something about violent video games," said Quist, "They are a serious concern."
People don't kill people, video games do.
Quist certainly hasn't lost his touch since the days when he proposed instituting abstinence-based sex ed as a plan to lower crime. In the December 22, 1993, Star Tribune article, "Quist twist on crime mixes liberal tenets with conservative," Dane Smith reported:
The biggest causes behind the rising crime
rate, Quist emphasized, is "promiscuity" and a resulting explosion in
single-family parents over the past 10 years. One of his key proposals
is an "abstinence-based" sex education program in the schools. . . .(Nexis All-News, accessed 2/10/2013)
Bluestem's readers of coarse sensibilities can write their own jokes about the effects of video-game withdrawal in joyless young boys. We simply couldn't comment.
. . .Past studies have failed to demonstrate a link between violent games
and real violence, said Christopher Ferguson, an associate professor of
psychology and communications at Texas A&M International University
in Laredo, Texas. Policy makers should focus on more important issues
including gun control and mental health, he said in an interview.
“We can’t find any evidence to support
this idea that exposure to video-game violence contributes in any way
to support the idea that these types of games or movies or TV shows are a
contributing factor,” Ferguson said. “It doesn’t need to be studied
again.”
Other news venues filed more nuanced accounts. On January 17, Suzy Khimm of the Washington Post WonkBlog wrote in POW! CRACK! What we know about video games and violence that Ferguson pointed out that "“video games have become more popular and more violent, while youth violence has declined.”
There's more:
But though there’s been a wide range of academic research on the
subject, there’s little to no conclusive evidence that playing video
games results in real-life violence, much less criminal acts. In 2011,
the Supreme Court struck down a California law restricting the sale and rental of violent video games to minors in a 7-2 ruling. The majority cited the state of existing research in its opinion:
Psychological studies purporting to show a connection
between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children
do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively. Any
demonstrated effects are both small and indistinguishable from effects
produced by other media…California also cannot show that the Act’s
restrictions meet the alleged substantial need of parents who wish to
restrict their children’s access to violent videos.
. . .In one 2012 article
for the Journal of Psychiatric Research, Ferguson and his co-authors
examined 165 participants over three years and found that playing
violent video games was not linked to youth aggression or dating
violence. Instead, they found that “depression, antisocial personality
traits, exposure to family violence and peer influences were the best
predictors of aggression-related outcomes.”
That said, there is evidence that violent video games may have a
tendency to make children who are already aggressive more hostile and
more aggressive — at least in the context of playing a video game,
Ferguson explains. “Openly aggressive children tend to intensify their
preference for games with a brutal and bloody plot over time,”
researchers wrote in a 2011 article for Media Psychology that examined 324 German grade-schoolers over one year. Ferguson points to another 2011 study
from the American Psychological Association that found that video games
were linked to aggression but not for the reasons you might expect. “It
appears that competition, not violence, may be the video game
characteristic that has the greatest influence on aggressive behavior,”
the researchers conclude. .. .
And there's this, also from January from MSN Video game makers urge Biden not to blame games for real violence:
The letters from the International Game Developers Association and the Entertainment Consumers Associationpointed
out that numerous studies have already been done showing that there
is no causal link between game violence and real violence.
"In
2011, video game sales increased to over $27 billion dollars and
violent crimes nationwide decreased 3.8 percent from 2010," Mercurio
wrote, pointing to the FBI's own statistics. "Since
2002, violent crime has decreased 15.5 percent. This is all during the
time when games like 'Call of Duty' and 'Halo' have dominated sales."
But
the letter from Greenberg, of the International Game
Developers Association, supported the idea of additional studies
about video games.
"Unlike some industry groups, the IGDA
does not seek to impede more scientific study about our members’
products. We welcome more evidence-based research into the effects of
our work," he wrote, but added: "We ask that any new government
research look at the totality of imaginary violence. Instead of simply
trying to find negative effects, we ask that any new research explore
the benefits of violent video games, too."
So perhaps we could violate the Constitution when it comes to video games. Bluestem suspects that our gamer friends would no more part with their "Call of Duty" games than Representative Cornish would surrender his coyote rifle.
Read the rest of Moniz's article at the New Ulm Journal.
The Minnesota House District 19A special election is Tuesday, February 12; the district in
Photo: Found on the Facebook page of Minnesota State University -- Mankato political science professor Joe Kunkel, these two literature pieces appear to be time travelers from the campaigns of Quist and DFL candidate Clark Johnson from the 1980s (they ran for different seats under earlier districting and never faced off against each other before). Bluestem is unable to verify the historical veracity of the facial hair on either gentleman. The lit pieces--and the beards--are for real and featured in Mankato Free Press political reporter Mark Fischenich's Campaign Notebook: Special election hits the home stretch. Much wonderfulness in the article. Go read it.
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Publicity-hungry Representative Tony Cornish (R-Good Thunder) is withdrawing two controversial bills he didn't yet introduce, and will fight for NRA lobbyists' talking points instead in the coming gun legislation hearings in the Minnesota House Public Safety Committee.
Paymar
also said they will hear a bill by Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Vernon Center,
that would allow teachers and other school staff members who have
conceal-and-carry permits to arm themselves in the classroom.
No votes will be taken on the bills next week. Paymar wants to put
together a larger gun violence prevention bill that includes the
proposals that garner the most support.
Here's a January 29, 2013 clip from KSTP 5 where Cornish's pistol-packing pedagogue proposal is discussed, along with Paymar's bills (which are in the hopper, not just the chair's imagination):
We're not sure what happened to Cornish's bills, since we've never had a chance to read them. Nor, so far as we can tell, has any other member of the public.
Cornish's phantom bills ditched in favor of NRA lobbyist talking points
For all the demand by gun enthusiasts, public opinion polls show that
most Americans support more restrictions on gun sales -- particularly
the military-style weapons and the high-capacity clips. Cornish said he
holds a "more guns, less crime" philosophy and believes gun control
proposals would be counterproductive.
So
he will be pushing forward with legislation to allow teachers -- and
probably other staff -- to carry concealed weapons even if a school's
principal or other school administrators don't approve. Teachers,
presuming they meet all other state requirements for carrying a weapon,
would only need to inform school administrators. Current law requires
permission from the administrators before a teacher can bring a weapon
to school. . . .
Cornish will also be making another attempt to require public colleges
to allow students to carry handguns on campus if they have the
applicable permits. He said Public Safety Committee Chairman Michael
Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, promised him a hearing on both bills later this
month.
Cornish
doesn't expect either bill to pass the DFL-controlled Legislature (nor
does he expect stricter gun-control legislation to be approved), but
pushing the legislation will give him time to present his case for a
more-guns approach to reducing gun violence. And he wants an opposing
voice to be heard when Paymar presents his gun-control proposals.
"What I hope to accomplish is anti-venom for these bills Michael Paymar is going to bring up," Cornish said.
House Public Safety Chair Michael Paymar has introduced the gun control bills, but Cornish has told an entirely new narrative about his own bills to Mankato Free Press staff writer Tim Krohn. He reports in Cornish vows to fight DFL gun bills:
Cornish had introduced a bill that would have allowed teachers with
permits to carry guns in school, a bill that had no chance of passing
the DFL-controlled Legislature. He said he is withdrawing that bill to
prevent it from detracting from debate on the other bills.
“I made a decision to pull my bills and concentrate my energies into defeating all of these proposals,” Cornish said Friday.
He is on the House Public Safety Committee, which is to discuss the
bills Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. He said he expects the DFL chair
“will allow all the testimony we want to give” and said he expects the
hearings will be boisterous. “I don’t think it’ll get out of order, but
there’ll be a lot of gaveling.”
This was curious stuff, since we hadn't seen Cornish introduce those two bills, only carry on a lot about them in the media. But it's possible we missed something, so we reviewed the "Introduction and First Reading of Bills" emails that we receive and eagerly read when the non-partisan webmaster for the Minnesota House of Representatives sends them.
When Bluestem reads through the introduction of bills (January 31, January 28, January 24, January 22, January 17, January 14, and January 10), we don't see that Cornish ever introduced that bill. We checked with friends who know about these sorts of things, and were told that if he had actually introduced the bills that he claims to have withdrawn, a record would exist for the legislation.
In short, Cornish is once more all hat and no hopper.
He does share the objections that NRA lobbyists want him to bring up next week. Krohn reports:
Cornish said he and NRA lobbyists believe all of the bills introduced are flawed . . .
. . . Cornish said he will push for the few things where the NRA and gun
restriction proponents can agree, such as expanding the categories of
people convicted of violent crimes who can’t own guns.
Find out what the NRA lobbyists object to by reading the Mankato Free Press article.
Cornish will clearly achieve his goal next week, generating headlines, rather than solutions, while the Public Safety Committee--and the state--won't have the chance to give his ideas a hearing.
Nice work, if you can get it.
Photo: Tony Cornish, all hat and no hopper (above); the Mankato Free Press article (below). Both photos from Representative Cornish's Facebook page. He writes of the Free Press article:
I was surprised to see this on the Front Page
of the Mankato Free Press this AM. I knew an article was coming out, but
I didn't know about the picture they got from Facebook. Ha. I can just
hear the e mails coming down the fiber optics, or wherever they come
from. I'll have to ask Al Gore, since he invented the Internet! [links added]
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One of the storylines Bluestem has been following since 2009 is that of Southern Minnesota's neo-Nazis. Led by Samuel Johnson, formerly of Austin, Minnesota, the white supremacist group tried to use anti-immigrant sentiment to recruit new members.
Their activities drew counter-protestors from as far away as the Twin Cities, and later the attention of the FBI's domestic terrorism task force. Last spring, Johnson's name turned up in a federal affidavit related to charges brought against Joseph Benjamin Thomas, Mendota Heights, when Thomas and Johnson were considering blowing up the Mexican consulate in St. Paul.
By September, Johnson, a felon, was in prison for possessing an assault weapon, while Thomas had troubles of his own with drug charges. Neither man was brought up on terrorism charges.
Now Johnson's wife, Theresa White, is mentioned as an example of B. Todd Jones' poor performance as U.S. attorney in Minnesota. The Star Tribune's Dan Browning and Paul McEnroe report in Former Minneapolis FBI director attacks Jones' ATF nomination:
A former director of the Minneapolis FBI office sent a letter this
week to members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee denouncing B.
Todd Jones' performance as U.S. attorney in Minnesota as they prepare to
consider his nomination to director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Donald E. Oswald, 54, a self-declared Democrat and supporter of
President Obama, said he felt "morally compelled" to alert the committee
about what he describes as Jones' "atrocious professional reputation
within the federal law enforcement community" in Minnesota.
In the letter, Oswald writes:
Moreover, in April 2012, at the conclusion of a long term joint FBI/ATF
undercover domestic terrorism investigation entitled "Operation Wrong
Reich," Mr. Jones' office failed to charge one defendent claiming
resource concerns. This investigation focused on a white supremist
groups, who among other things, discussed plans to bomb the Mexican Consulate in Saint Paul.
Defendant Teresa White, along with her husband, Sam Johnson--a
convicted felons, and Joseph Thomas, also a convicted felon, were
arrested on a multitude of federal charges. But suddenly, without
concurrence from the FBI or ATF, Mr. Jones' office declined to pursue
legitimate federal charges against Tereas White for an illegal straw
purchase of a firearm, conspiracy to illegally transfer a firearm, and
making false statements to federal la enforcement officials, claiming
resource issues. Mr. Jones can't have it both ways--that is to say--he
can't claim to be focusing USAO resources on terrorism matters, but fail
to pursue established felony firearm charges against a domestic terrorism defendant. (Letter, page 5)
This is new information about the arrests of Johnson and Thomas, adding a third person to the case. We're hoping to obtain more documents related to the case, as there's little online about Teresa White (an different individual from the time of the Austin agitation; Johnson was arrested for abandoning a dog when his former household was breaking up).
In addition to the list two letters of members resigning from the NSM
were also obtained. One was from Cynthia Keene from Springfield, MO, who
resigned for unknown reasons in 2010 but still said she will continue
to support the group's efforts. The other was from neo-Nazi Samuel James
Johnson, who said in his 2010 email that he is resigning to chart
another course in his activism. "There is no more purpose for
organizational ties, the time has come purely and simply for
organization," his email read. "I am not talking about a protest or a
street walk or handing out fliers to try to wake people up who will not
be awakened until there life's (sic) have been effected enough to see
the truth. I think you know what I'm getting at."
According to
recent information that has been obtained, Johnson is a convicted felon
who resides at [redacted] Fairmont, MN. He was recently married
to an alleged neo-Nazi named Teresa Goad, a/k/a Teresa Johnson-White,
who works as a nurse [redacted]
We can't vouch for the accuracy of this information, which is from March 2012.However, the gun crime charges that involve helping a felon illegally obtain firearms--and doing it on behalf of someone planning large-scale, hateful crimes--are sort of things that many Americans don't want to see go unpunished.
And while we believe that there's a need for additional gun regulations, Bluestem also thinks that given Johnson's perchant for violence, the public might have been served had the United State Attorney's Office pursued Theresa White's case.
Screenshot: The passage from the Oswald letter (above); Sam Johnson--yeah, that guy (below)
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This year's real Minnesota winter has signaled the return of "The Shining" quality cabin fever, and with United States Senators nearing agreement on broad immigration reform proposal, Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (MinnSIR) anti-immigrant Ruthie Hendrycks has updated her website and is blogging again, as well as hosting weekly "The Ruthie Report."
Susan Tully, the national field director of the DC-based
anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
voiced a number of conspiracy theories and made many
anti-immigrant comments during an interview with a right-wing radio
show on January 17, 2013. . . .
During the radio interview, Tully disparaged DREAM
Act-eligible students for what she called arrogance and accused
Democratic politicians in California of having ties to Mexico.
She also claimed that students are crossing the U.S./Mexico border on
a daily basis to attend American schools.
The claims of "arrogance" aren't particularly original, having been circulated in Ruben Navarrette’s nationally syndicated column “DREAMers are pushing their luck. Former City Pages staff writer Gregory Pratt effectively takes down that piece at Vivelohoy in The DREAMers I know; Pratt's reporting on Arizon's DREAMers won state press club awards when he worked in Phoenix.
When talking about a potential comprehensive immigration
reform bill, Tully argued that there should be a study of people
granted documented status in the 1986 to see what became of them
since that time, insinuating that many may have become criminals. . . .
Read the entire post at the ADL's blog. Listening to the podcast, Bluestem noticed that the ADL, a group not especially known as shy, actually holds back. Tully claims that a corrections officer at Folsom Prison told her that 90 percent of the inmates in the famous penitentiary are the children of people who gained citizenship as part of President Reagan's 1986 immigration reforms.
Tully also claims that undocumented Latinos are smuggling piranhas into California, and that when their hapless owners are faced with feeding their pets a pound of prime rib each day, they release them into California's waters.
Images: Ruthie Hendrycks (yellow jacket, above); Piranhas: invasive species, agents of liberty, or just signs of really nutty obsessions about brown people? (below).
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Two unrelated stories illustrate how we're living in the waning days of Babylon, though Bluestem will leave it to the conspiracist theorists among our readership to define the connective tissue in the two narratives.
Nienaber reports that a North Mankato police officer passed along an anonymous tip to the Minnesota River Valley Drug Task Force that 29-year-old convicted felon Michael Donald Caya was doing meth and acting crazy. The Drug Task Force recognized the name from an earlier lead that placed Caya in the Eagle Lake Mobile Home Park trading meth for guns without serial numbers.
Apparently the enterprizing Caya thought he needed the weapons for the coming Obamazombie apocalypse. The Free Press reports:
Caya, who was placed on 20 years of probation for a 2006 felony drug
possession conviction in Watonwan County, was interviewed by a task
force agent at the Nicollet County Jail Monday. He allegedly told the
agent he thought the world was coming to an end and he thought he had to
protect his family and neighbors from the government, the complaint
said. Caya said he spent between $3,000 and $4,000 for the guns, bought
his methamphetamine by the ounce and bought his marijuana by the pound,
the agent reported.
The Watonwan County whacko was also out to save women from sex trafficking by contacting every Mankato area prostitute, taking them to hotel rooms and plying them with drugs to get them to disclose their pimp or pimps:
Caya also allegedly told the agent he had been setting up meetings with
prostitutes in Mankato. He claimed he had called every escort with a
Mankato link on the Backpage.com website and met them at one of two
hotels in town, the agent reported. Caya denied having sex with the
women, but said he would use drugs with them and talk. His plan was to
identify the man in charge of the women, but he told the agent he didn’t
know what he would do if he identified the man.
“(Caya) stated that, despite his drug addiction, he thought he would
make a good police officer because he was a good person with good morals
and ethical decisions,” the complaint said.
Despite his virtue, the authorities have not looked kindly on Caya:
Caya has been charged with nine counts of being a felon in possession of
a firearm, nine counts of being a felon in possession of a handgun or
an assault style weapon, one count of third-degree drug possession and
three counts of fifth-degree drug possession, which are all felonies.
His bail was set $75,000 during his first court appearance Wednesday.
Caya's neighbors might not be protected from the government now, although they will have the option of voting for Allen Quist in the coming special election in Minnesota House District 19A.
Birds of a different feather occupy North Fargo hood
Fargo police are looking to catch a gigantic gang of fugitives making
life in a northside neighborhood a foul – or is that fowl? –
experience.
A group of wild turkeys that may be as many as 80
birds strong – a rafter, as a group of turkeys is known – has infested
the area a few blocks south of Edgewood Golf Course in the northeast
corner of the city, near Peterson Parkway and Birdie Street.
Yes, Birdie Street.
Whether
they’re attracted to the street’s name, or more likely to the nearby
river and one of the city’s biggest stretches of green space, the birds
and their byproducts have worn out their welcome.
Local law enforcement and the North Dakota Game and Fish Department are on the case:
Fargo police Lt. Joel Vettel said the police, with the help of the
North Dakota Game and Fish Department, are starting a baiting and
trapping process to attempt to net the birds and move them out to a more
rural area.
They’ll be feeding the birds on the nearby Cardinal
Muench seminary property, and they’re asking people in the neighborhood
to stop feeding the birds in the meantime.
The department sent letters to residents in the area last week, informing them of their plans to deal with the turkey takeover.
Police
also ask that potential onlookers remain respectful of private property
and the wildlife while the trapping is going on, though Vettel admits
the birds haven’t been quite so mannerly.
In addition to leaving
their waste all over people’s property, he said they are capable of
property damage like knocking down and destroying yard items.
Read the rest of Welker's article at the Forum and check out th video of the rafter blocking traffic.
Photo: Michael Donald Caya, from the Nicollet County Sheriff's Department (above); Turkey gang occupying North Fargo neighborhood (below, via the Fargo Forum).
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Forum Communications newspapers in Fargo and Grand Forks report that lawmakers in Minnesota and North Dakota are listening to workers locked out by hardball management. Meanwhile, in a cruel twist, workers cleaning Target stores overnight were locked in, a violation of OSHA law.
Both are signs of breaking bad management that will do anything for the bottomline.
The Fargo Forum notes that "Unlike a worker strike, a lockout is when an organization’s management locks out union workers, often over pay disputes." Workers--sugar refinery employers, classical musicians, and professional hockey players--have been locked out in both states.
Committee Chairman Joe Atkins, DFL-Inver Grove Heights, said in an
interview that he plans two lockout provisions in bills still being
written.
One would require organizations that lock out employees
to pay unemployment insurance through the lockout’s duration. The other
would restrict lockouts by organizations receiving state funds. . . .
. . . Atkins’ committee heard Durand, a Minnesota State
Community and Technical College instructor, say “the social fabric has
been weakened” in Moorhead.
She said the contract the employees
worked under would not allow them to strike during sugar beet harvest,
but allowed management to lock out workers.
Costs to communities
along the Red River and elsewhere in Minnesota, she said, include paying
unemployment insurance for locked out workers, higher taxes to cover
health care for those who lost coverage but were forced to seek
emergency room care, increased substance abuse and overcrowded homeless
shelters. . . .
Under North Dakota law, locked out workers received no unemployment benefits. State senator Phil Murphy (D-Portland) wants to change that, the Grand Forks Herald reports in Proposal may be too late to help American Crystal workers. GFH staff writer Christopher Bjorke reports:
A Portland, N.D., Democrat has introduced a bill that would extend
unemployment benefits to workers locked out of their jobs, but is not
sure if American Crystal Sugar workers would qualify.
“I just see
it as a situation that doesn’t seem quite right to me,” said Sen. Phil
Murphy on his proposal to add an exemption for anyone who “has been
locked out by that individual’s employer and prevented from working” to
the section of state law disqualifying striking workers from
unemployment benefits.
. . . Like Murphy, the other sponsors of the bill are Democrats: Sens.
Connie Triplett of Grand Forks and Tim Mathern of Fargo and Reps. Bill
Amerman of Forman, Richard Holman of Mayville and Gail Mooney of
Cummings.
Murphy, Holman and Mooney all represent District 20, the location of American Crystal’s Hillsboro factory.
Murphy
said he had not been in contact with union officials representing
American Crystal workers, and he did not want it to be considered to
have been written for unions.
“If it’s perceived that way, it could poison the well,” he said. “I would guess it would be an uphill battle.”
The
North Dakota Supreme Court is considering the eligibility of employees
of the North Dakota factories. Murphy said he decided to introduce the
bill because the court does not say when it will announce decisions. . . .
It's uncertain whether ACS workers, now locked out for 17 months, would be able to receive benefits under the proposed law.
In OSHA charges filed last week, twenty-five workers allege that they
were regularly locked indoors while cleaning Target stores in the Twin
Cities.
“At 11 at night, I would ring the doorbell to get let in, and then
from there, we would be locked in the store all night, until 7 am
when they opened the store,” said Honorio Hernandez, who cleaned Target
stores for three years before leaving a year ago for other work. “I was
scared that something would happen, and I wouldn’t be able to get out
of the store…. But I never complained about it because I was scared that
I would lose my job.” (Hernandez was interviewed in Spanish.)
Hernandez has worked for all three of the janitorial contractors
named in the OSHA complaints: Carlson Building Maintenance, Prestige
Maintenance USA and Diversified Maintenance Systems. Currently
unemployed, Hernandez is an activist with the Minnesota labor group that
organized the complaints, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha. . . .
While the cleaning workers are legally employed by Target’s contractors,
CTUL charges that Target management has been well aware that they’re
being locked inside its stores. Hernandez told The Nation that
there was generally a single manager on site during his shift, and those
managers were employees of Target, not of the contractors. He added
that in an emergency, workers would have needed to get the manager to
unlock a door and let them out of the building, and “you can’t
necessarily find them very easily” within the store. . . .
Locked doors contributed to high death counts in notorious workplace fires at a chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, and the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. More recently, fire exits were found to be a factor in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh in which 112 workers perished; the company made clothing for Walmart and other retailers.
Both lockouts and lockups illustrate the perils of management gone wild.
Image: Tild's take on ACS's lockout.
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Although two pistol-packing bills state representative Tony Cornish (R-Tombstone) promises to introduce in the Minnesota House have zero chance of becoming law, the retired lawman tells the Mankato Free Press that Public Safety Committee chair Michael Paymar has agreed to hear the bills.
So much for cutting waste by small-government conservatives, but the hearings should achieve Cornish's general agenda: headlines for Tony Cornish.
For all the demand by gun enthusiasts, public opinion polls show that most Americans support more restrictions on gun sales -- particularly the military-style weapons and the high-capacity clips. Cornish said he holds a "more guns, less crime" philosophy and believes gun control proposals would be counterproductive.
So he will be pushing forward with legislation to allow teachers -- and probably other staff -- to carry concealed weapons even if a school's principal or other school administrators don't approve. Teachers, presuming they meet all other state requirements for carrying a weapon, would only need to inform school administrators. Current law requires permission from the administrators before a teacher can bring a weapon to school.
Originally, Cornish had simply proposed letting teachers with permits carry--until it was discovered that state law already allowed the practice, so long as the teacher obtains an administrator's permission. Now, they'll just have to give notice.
But that's not all! Cornish will bring guns out of the parking lot and into the halls of ivy:
Cornish will also be making another attempt to require public colleges to allow students to carry handguns on campus if they have the applicable permits. He said Public Safety Committee Chairman Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, promised him a hearing on both bills later this month.
Cornish doesn't expect either bill to pass the DFL-controlled Legislature (nor does he expect stricter gun-control legislation to be approved), but pushing the legislation will give him time to present his case for a more-guns approach to reducing gun violence. And he wants an opposing voice to be heard when Paymar presents his gun-control proposals.
"What I hope to accomplish is anti-venom for these bills Michael Paymar is going to bring up," Cornish said.
It's not as if he won't have a say as minority lead on the committee when those bills are heard, but leading the news is a lot less likely. The bills aren't in the hopper yet.
Cartoon: Anti-Venom. Cornish is Eddie Brooks to Representative Paymar's Peter Parker. Or whatever.
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Although critics of the NRA's stance on school safety--putting an armed police or security officer in every school building in the country as part of the --have been swift to criticize the gun rights organization's lucrative connections with the firearms industry, former Arkansas Congressman Asa Hutchinson's business ties with the world's largest private employers of security officers have gone unnoticed in the media.
Public school systems in Tulsa, Detroit, Washington DC and other places have contracted with Securitas for school security guard personnel. News accounts suggest that some Securitas school security officers, like those in Tulsa, are or have been armed; in 2006, the Tulsa World reported that a guard shot at dogs that were attacking a student and teacher (Andrea Eger, "School's guard shoots at dogs," Tulsa World, March 30, 2006, Nexis All News, accessed 1/6/2013).
Director - W. Asa Hutchinson, a Senior Partner of AH Law
Group of Rogers, AR, Director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration and the first-ever Under Secretary for Border &
Transportation Security at the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security, and U.S. Congressman from the Third District of
Arkansas. After the September 11 attacks, Congress created
the Department of Homeland Security. President George W.
Bush tapped Hutchinson to lead the Border and Transportation
Security Directorate, the largest division of the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) with more than 110,000
employees. Hutchinson was confirmed by unanimous consent
by the U.S. Senate
Hutchinson also lobbied for Securitas while working for Venable LLC, a top Washington DC law firm whose work often requires staff to register with the Senate under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Hutchinson and his colleagues represented Securitas's interests in a number of bills related to airport security. The database states that the firm received $200,000 from Securitas for these services.
Here's the registration filing; for Hutchinson's name and the bills in which he lobbied Congress on behalf of the Swedish company, go to page 3:
Asa Hutchinson: National School Shield Emergency
Response Program not just volunteers anymore
In Hutchinson's first prepared statement during the remarks-only press conference on December 21, he spoke about creating a model school security template and training volunteer school security forces at each school in the country. Wayne LaPierre spoke of stationing a police office in each school building.
But in the weeks since, both men have modified their assertions, allowing that armed security officers, not just sworn police officers, might be part of the school shield solution.
. . . Yet another option, Hutchinson said, is the expansion of school
resource officers, on-duty armed police who perform a wide range of
tasks in schools that include interacting with students, teachers and
administrators and helping implement security measures.
Hutchinson estimated the cost of putting a resource officer in every
school at $2 billion to $3 billion a year, which he acknowledged would
be hard to fund in lean budgetary times.
In the 2009-2010 school year, there were 23,200 armed security
personnel in schools nationwide, 28 percent of all schools, according to
the National Center for Education Statistics. . . .
. . .I have recently been asked to
lead a comprehensive national effort to improve the safety of our
schools. A part of this solution will be the increased presence of
trained, armed and professional security officers in the schools.
Currently, about one third of our nation's schools have armed security.
. . .We have seen
several schools take steps to enhance safety by immediately increasing
the use of trained officers on their property. But not every school can
afford the costs, and not all armed officers are equally trained.
That
is why it is so critical to create an effective federal, state and
local sharing of costs, and, most importantly, to assure a high standard
of training and certification. The training of armed personnel to
protect our children should not be less than those who are trained to
protect our airlines or even the president.
Finally,
the safety of our children is more than just armed officers. It is
about access control, perimeter security, surveillance, architecture,
policies and drills. My school-safety task force will look into all of
these needs and offer the best practices and model security protocols to
our schools.
"Officer" isn't synonymous with "police officer." It can mean "security officer." Indeed, Bluestem's friends who work in security prefer the term; it's certainly better than the snide label,"rent-a-cop."
If the task force Hutchinson leads recommends armed security officers--and federal and state elected leaders decide to allocate resources to the findings, how big of a slice of the school security officer pie will go to Securitas?
The Administrator and the Lobbyist: Earlier Criticisms of Hutchinson's Ethics
This poor country blogger isn't the first to ask questions about Hutchinson's self-interest in his advocacy for corporations with which he has a working relationship. When he left the Department of Homeland Security to toil as a lobbyist at Venable LLC to work for clients with homeland security issues and contracts, the press raised its eyebrows.
When he unsuccessfully ran for Arkansas governor in 2006, the Democrats raised these criticisms again, expanding them when armed with the candidate's mandatory financial disclosure. Since Hutchinson is chatting to Arkansas newspapers about running for governor in 2014, it's possible that this potential new conflation of public policy with the private profits of a corporation in which Hutchinson has an interest might again raise questions.
Asa Hutchinson, who stepped down this week as a top administrator at
the Department of Homeland Security, has joined a law firm based in
Washington that represents major domestic security contractors and
companies regulated by the department.
Mr. Hutchinson, 54, who as
under secretary at the department oversaw transportation and border
security, will be barred for at least one year from interacting directly
with department officials. But he can advise companies that are
pursuing contracts with the agency or are subject to its regulatory
review. . . .
Mr. Hutchinson, a former congressman who may run for Arkansas governor
in 2006, would not say how much he was being paid or who some of his
probable clients would be.
This move played to Hutchinson's disadvantage in the 2006 race. Andrew DeMillo of the Associated Press reported in "Parties find attack lines for governor's race:"
Arkansas Republicans and Democrats have found similar lines of attack in the gubernatorial campaign.
For Democrats, it's focusing on Asa Hutchinson's former job. . .
. . . Democrats last week lobbed questions about Asa Hutchinson's
negotiation with a Washington law firm while he was employed at the
federal Department of Homeland Security. Hutchinson eventually took a
job with the firm, Venable LLP
Venable
had clients with business before Homeland Security, but Hutchinson said
he followed the law and, in writing, formally stepped aside from any
business involving the firm.
Criticism over
Hutchinson's past aren't new from Democrats, who have tried to peg
shortcomings in Homeland Security to Hutchinson's tenure as the
department's undersecretary.
But the lobbying
questions reveal a new line of criticism from Democrats after the state
GOP questioned whether Beebe has used his office to conduct political
business. . . .(February 11, 2006, Nexis All-News, accessed 1/6/2013).
Hutchinson's disclosure of his financial interests also drew fire when he amended it to include a $1 million return on a $2,800 investment in Fortress America. Demillo reported in "Beebe: Hutchinson potential $1 million windfall a sweetheart deal":
The chairman
of the Democratic Party of Arkansas and Democratic gubernatorial
candidate Mike Beebe on Wednesday questioned Republican rival Asa Hutchinson for turning an investment of $2,800 in a homeland-security related business into a potential $1 million windfall.
Hutchinson,
who before announcing his bid for governor was an undersecretary at the
federal Department of Homeland Security, was a founder and investor in Fortress America Acquistion Corp.
The
company, formed to buy an existing company involved in emergency
preparedness or a related field, conducted an initial public offering of
its stock, which raised $42 million.
Hutchinson
owns 200,000 shares in the company. Its shares were offered at $6 and
closed Tuesday at $5.40. The company founders, a group of ex-congressmen
and other insiders, initially put up $25,000. That investment is now
worth $9.5 million; Hutchinson's share is worth $1.08 million. . . .
. . .The holding was not listed on Hutchinson's May 4 financial disclosure form for his race for governor. The candidate amended the form on May 5 to include Fortress America.
Jason
Willett, chairman of the Democratic Party of Arkansas, questioned why
Hutchinson didn't originally report the investment on his form.
"I
think this definitely raises some serious questions about how Mr.
Hutchinson could forget to report a million dollar investment," Willett
said. "Most Arkansans would never forget about turning $2,800 into a
million dollars over twelve months."
Hutchinson
spokesman David Kinkade said Hutchinson made a "simple error" by
omitting the investment, but realized it and quickly amended his report. . . .(June 8, 2006, Nexis All-News, accessed 1/6/2013).
His work on a National Rifle Association initiative
to study school safety and push for armed guards in schools allows him
to tout his pro-gun credentials in a state where Democrats and
Republicans alike boast of their gun collections in political ads.
If Hutchinson's connections with the world's largest private security firm comes to be seen as a conflict of interest in that initiative, will Arkansas voters recall the old revolving door charges and see Hutchinson as less of a publicservant and more of a crony capitalist?
Photo: From Securitas's 2011 report, a school security officer by a classic yellow school bus.
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Representative and former crappie cop Tony Cornish is at it again, rhetorical guns blazing in favor of armed defenders in the schools, and by this, he means one in every building, one per school system.
The means to pay for the personnel? He hasn't spelled out the details, but it's not providing money at the state level for his new mandates. (That's reserved for Gopher and Vikings stadiums).
It's slicing the cash from schools' athletic team budgets.
Here's the bottom line: When a psycho pulls up out front, you have
seconds to act. A camera won't do any good unless there's a gun behind
it. A window won't do any good unless it's bulletproof. All the
counselors and therapists you can hire won't do any good unless they are
armed.
You can't afford to completely encase your schools with
bulletproof windows and steel locked doors -- but you can afford to
share the cost of an officer with the city or county, as some districts
are doing.
If colleges can pay their coaches millions per year and
even our small schools can pour thousands into sports programs, they can
afford part of an officer's salary.
Cornish could have proposed legislation pulling money out of University of Minnesota's system or capping the Gophers' coach's salaries and diverting that money to public school safety, but a close reading reveals that he's mostly trying to inflame his readers' imaginations with the thought of those millions.
Cornish loved himself a Gophers stadium; mum about Gophers coaching salaries
It makes me sick to think this money is earmarked for improving the
arts or culture in this state, then realize that many directors of these
non-profit organizations are actually turning quite a profit for
themselves.
If Cornish--who loves the limelight--spoke out about Big Ten coaching salaries before, we haven't found it.
He certainly had the microphone, but ended up voting for a deal that increased the state's share of the cost of the stadium over what the U requested. MPR's votetracker has the deets (Cornish's yes vote) in University of Minnesota Gophers football stadium.
He did however, vote for background checks for K-12 coaches, so we can at least rest assured if the coaches are packing, they'll have gone through some sort of scrutiny before they lock and load. However, if the local psycho needs to get a gun, Representative Tony Cornish certainly isn't going to stand in the way by supporting a gun-rights hating measure like closing the loophole at gun shows that allows buyers to dodge background checks at gun shows. Silly rabbits: background checks are for coaches.
Cornish loved LGA cuts that cut Mankato's public safety officers
No more gun regulation--let's hire officers at every school, or so Cornish would have you think. However, he hasn't always seen the need for officers in Blue Earth County schools. He mentions the case of Mankato Public Schools--and it's worth looking at how Cornish's revenue and funding priorities affected the very program he cites.
While Cornish now wants to raid athletic programs to turn schools into Fortress America, he didn't seem overly concerned about cutting Local Government Aid, a Republican priority that caused Mankato to reduce the number of police liaison officers.
. . .At one point several years ago, Mankato had four liaison officers
working in the city’s schools. That was cut to one officer per high
school, then later cut to one officer for the entire district in 2009
because of cuts to Local Government Aid. Rother’s current position is
paid for by the school district.
Since being cut to one officer, the school district has been looking at
ways to hire another officer through grants or other funding sources,
said Sheri Blasing, West High School assistant principal. They have not
been successful. . . .
. . . When Rother is at East High School or responding to problems at another
school, Blasing or other West employees have to call on regular patrol
officers to handle police situations. . . .
Some of these cuts will affect Cornish’s role as chief of police,
because local government aid will be cut by as much as 25 percent, and
Cornish said he may be forced to cut programs or an officer.
Cornish has supported cutting local government aid as cinsistently as he has trying to grab the limelight--or opposed any sort of common sense changes to gun regulations. Now he's advocating for putting the officers in school buildings that his own votes cut, but his mandate isn't going to be backed by any funding.
Nope: that's to squeezed out of coaching salaries, from an activity that boosts kids' sense of achievement and gives them something healthy to do--and promotes a sense of community in small towns (ask people here in Hutchinson how we feel about our football team or girls' basketball program).
Bluestem doesn't favor banning all guns--or changing the carry permit law back to "may issue" since carry permits require education and background checks on the part of the holder.
That being said, Cornish's refusal to see anything other than more guns in the schools--and doing so by robbing funds from an activity that genuinely helps children channel their aggression in healthy ways--seems calculated more toward getting attention on himself.
There's a complicated discussion to be had about what can be done to make schools safer. Like Cornish's bluster about Israeli school security, the cheap shot at K-12 coaches misses the mark.
Photos: Tony Cornish (below) will sacrifice K12 coaches and their starter pistols (above) now to pay for police officers since someone coaching at the U makes seven figures....after cutting the LGA that once paid for officers in the schools. He does love this armed but unfunded mandate for realsies.
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When it comes to Israel and school shootings, Wayne LaPierre doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Israeli security experts said Sunday.
Such shootings are very rare in Israel and have been associated with terror attacks, not crazed gunmen, they said.
...Yigal Palmor, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said the situation in Israel was “fundamentally different” from that in the United States.
“We didn’t have a series of school shootings, and they had nothing to do with the issue at hand in the United States. We had to deal with terrorism,” said Palmor.
“What removed the danger was not the armed guards but an overall anti-terror policy and anti-terror operations which brought street terrorism down to nearly zero over a number of years,” he said. “It would be better not to drag Israel into what is an internal American discussion,” he added.
“There is no comparison between maniacs with psychological problems opening fire at random to kill innocent people and trained terrorists trying to murder Israeli children,” said Reuven Berko, a retired Israeli Army colonel and senior police officer.
. . .[GOCRA President Joseph E.] Olson pointed out that the State of Israel faced a similar school
violence threat after PLO terrorists targeted schoolchildren in the
Ma’alot massacre 1974, killing 25 . The Israeli government started
encouraging reservists keep their guns at home and carry them on the
streets. Teachers armed themselves, and volunteer parents and
grandparents in plain clothing patrolled the schools and accompanied
every field trip. Israel went more than a quarter century with no
further school attacks.
The worst attack on an Israeli school was in 1974, when terrorists from
the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine took 115 people
hostage in a school in Maalot in northern Israel. Twenty-five people
were killed as Israeli commandos stormed the building, 22 of them
children.
“The attempt to compare the two tragedies is absurd,” said Prof. Gerald
Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University. “Palestinian terror attacks like one
one at Maalot — the goal of which was to use the children as hostages in
order to free other terrorists — are totally different from crimes
committed by deranged people with guns.”
As some observers have pointed out, both Columbine and Fort Hood were protected by armed law enforcement personnel. Their presence didn't deter the shooters from opening fire. Ironically, the deputy stationed at Columbine says armed guards at schools coupled with assault weapons ban would keep students safe the New York Daily News reports.
An added kicker: a [l]ittle-known Minnesota exemption allows guns in schools, the Star Tribune reported on December 20. Would the solution be more guns? Or an Israeli-style maximum security state with strict gun laws? Or fewer guns, more carefully regulated?
Photo: A security guard in the Ankeny, Iowa, school system. Six guards patrol the schools; three are armed. The guards are employed by Per Mar Security Services. The school transitioned from police offices to the private company in 2011.
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The last time Tony Cornish gained attention from wanting to combine education and firearms was the first anniversary of America's most lethal spree shooting, the tragedy at Virginia Tech. In 2008, Star Tribune staff writer Pat Doyle reported in Bill would allow students with permits to carry weapons on MnSCU campuses:
A year after a deranged gunman killed 32 students and faculty at
Virginia Tech, a debate over thwarting future attacks continues in
Minnesota, where a legislator advocates allowing students to carry
concealed weapons for protection on campus.
The proposal by Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, faces an uphill
climb but reflects a national movement among gun advocates and some
students to overturn prohibitions on students carrying weapons at
college.
. . .The bill Cornish introduced Wednesday would remove the authority of
universities to prohibit gun possession by students on school grounds.
The change would allow students 21 and older with gun permits to bring
weapons on campus.
In reports about the bill from Minnesota Public Radio and City Pages, Cornish is getting the attention he craves as the Republican lead (ranking minority member) of the House Public Safety committee the retired lawman chaired last session when the MNGOP controlled the legislature.
But Cornish first garnered some hometown headlines when he went on the local CBS/FOX affiliate, KEYC-TV, to preen in front of the camera the very day of the shootings, before the children's bodies were even removed from where they fell.
But while state representative Tony Cornish believes legislation can
help, he holds the opposite view of what lawmakers should do.
"Israel had a problem with this years ago, and they started letting
teachers carry guns and it solved the problem, says Cornish, a
Republican from Good Thunder. "Other state in our nation have passed
laws allowing teachers to carry firearms, and I've heard from a number
of parents that agree with this."
Cornish says that while liaison officers can offer some armed presence and security in schools, the state needs to go further.
"In fact I had a policeman tell me tonight that we need to arm our teachers because they can't be everywhere."
So teachers get added duties: armed security officer. To give Cornish his due, we must remember that he was endorsed by Minnesota's teachers' union, Education Minnesota, in 2010. Although he was unopposed in 2012, the union did not endorse him.
Here's the video:
Stories from the Holy Land: armed security guards
The "Israeli teachers carry guns and there's no problem" tale (variation: "All Israeli teachers are required to carry") is so common right now that it's hard to track down whether or not the example is true or not. Bluestem looked into the question and found some interesting answers.
First, when we examined the sources of the claim about packing Israeli school teachers, we generally found that those making these assertions passed around the same set of links and articles that eventually traced back to articles posted between 1999 and 2002. With each spree shooting, the example was repeated, but not examined anew.
There are a couple recent examples online in the last couple of days where writers familiar with Israel say that the claim's a weak one. Most send readers to this post, Are Israeli Teachers Armed?--crossposted at various venues. Ron Cantor, the writer is aligned with messianic Judaism--no dirty hippie--and the column is turning up on mostly conservative Christan sites. Take with a grain of salt.
Stories from the Jerusalem Post are much more persuasive and largely confirm Cantor's general premise that school security guards protect schools from terrorist attacks. Some of the most persuasive articles cover what happens when the guards don't show up en masse, either through funding cuts or strikes.
When they heard about the Sandy Hook school slaughter, my children were
surprised that the school had no security guards. Educated in Jewish
schools in Montreal and in Jerusalem, they have always studied shielded
by security guards and locked gates. They take that situation for
granted, even as resent Jews’ unfortunate vulnerability in both cities. I
want my kids, I want all kids, to live in a world where schools are the
super-safe refuges they should be rather than the targets for
terrorists and maniacs they sometimes are.
On August 28, 2008, the JP's Abe Selig reported in "School year still under threat despite cancellation of cuts":
But with only
four days left and two other major matters unresolved - the issue of
security guards for schools and safety violations in a number of
institutions across the country - the threat of classes not starting at
all remains very real.
"If security guards are not
standing at the entrances of schools on Monday, teachers will still
arrive for work, and they will send their students home," said Keren
Shaked, a spokeswoman for the Secondary School Teachers Organization,
the union that led last year's strike that paralyzed public schools for
55 days. "We cannot allow there to be a situation in which the entrances
to our school are unguarded and anyone can just walk right in."
The
security guard issue remains a complicated one, with the Education and
Public Security ministries trading blame over who is responsible for
providing such guards and the underlying funding issue rooted in
proposed cuts to the draft 2009 state budget that was approved by the
cabinet after a 16-hour session on Monday night.
While
a last-minute agreement was reached between senior officials from both
ministries regarding guards for elementary schools on Wednesday evening,
upper level schools, where the SSTO holds sway, remain a problem.
A
spokeswoman for the Education Ministry told The Jerusalem Post on
Wednesday that the Public Security Ministry, which oversees the police,
has been responsible for the security guards since 1995. She also
referred to police Cmdr. Meir Ben-Yishai's statements at the Knesset on
Wednesday morning, in which he protested the government's decision to
cut the budget for security guards, saying it would severely detract
from safety at schools.
"The police
inspector-general [David Cohen] has held three separate meetings on this
issue," Ben-Yishai said, "And he has recommended that school security
needs to continue, the same way it does at the entrances to restaurants,
banks and event halls."
The Public Security
Ministry quipped back in a statement: "The responsibility for deployment
of security guards at educational institutions is the responsibility of
the Education Ministry. To our regret, the Education Ministry did not
bother to fight against the budget cuts for security guards, which is
their job and does not fall under the responsibility of the police."
The Education Ministry spokeswoman responded: "Every year in the past [the Public Security Ministry] has had the budget for [school security guards]. Now that the money isn't there, it's become our problem."
The
issue threatens to derail the school year from day one, with the SSTO
leading the call for classes to be canceled, and others following suit. (Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
In short: without the security guards, the teachers don't protect students themselves. They send kids home. On September 1, 2009, the JP's Selig reported in "School year to begin today, despite looming issues":
Meanwhile,
the head of the Secondary School Teachers Organization, Ran Erez, said
earlier in the week that a number of other unresolved issues were still
looming on a national level.
According to Erez, those issues included the ongoing shortage of certified security guards for the country's schools . . .
Police officers will temporary fill in for missing school security guards until after Rosh Hashana, Lt.-Cmdr. Meir Ben-Yishai, head of the Israel Police's Security Department, said Monday, as an estimated 10 percent of all guard positions are unfilled.
Ben-Yishai
met with security officers and Education Ministry officials Monday to
assess security at schools ahead of the start of the school year.
Erez had said that any junior high or high school that has no guard Tuesday would not open. (Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
Security cameras proposed for Israeli schools
There's more. In "School security guards to be trained to intervene against student violence" (July 29, 2009) Yaakov Lappin reported in the Jerusalem Post that the security needs of the schools were changing:
School security guards,
who until now have focused on preventing external threats like
terrorism, will begin receiving specialized training on how to deal with
pupil violence.
In addition, closed-circuit
television cameras linked up to control rooms will monitor school
playgrounds, as part of a series of steps being taken by police to
tackle violence in schools.
The measures were announced Tuesday by Lt.-Cmdr. Meir Ben-Yishai, head of the Israel
Police's Security Department, during a meeting with security officers
responsible for educational institutions from across the country.
"These
steps stem from a need that has been identified in recent years,"
police spokeswoman Orit Friedman told The Jerusalem Post. "The guards
will be trained to deal with confrontations and to intervene in fights
between pupils.
"Until today, the role of the guards
was limited to dealing with terrorism and external threats. But they
should be able to provide solutions to incidents on school grounds as
well," Friedman said.
Friedman denied there was a
recent rise in school violence, but noted that injuries resulting from
fights and stabbings were a reality in Israeli schools.
"Having trained guards on site will cut out the need to wait for police to arrive," she added.
As part of the reforms, CCTV cameras installed in school playgrounds will feed live images to municipal control rooms.
"Pupils
will be monitored at all times in playgrounds and other areas of the
school, where the presence of teachers could be lacking," Friedman said.
While away from the front gate, the security guard can lock the school's main entrance to avoid security breaches, she added.
The type of training school guards receive from their companies is dictated and monitored by the Israel
Police. According to the new guidelines, courses for new guards will be
extended from four to six days, and there will be a greater emphasis on
firearms training.(Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
So not only was the training changing, but security cameras were to be installed at schools, with monitors feeding images into the local police stations. This proposal drew cries of "Big Brother," according to a report by the JP's Ben Hartman, "CCTV cameras won't go into classrooms or corridors. Surveillance to be limited to school gates and yards, police say":
A plan to set
up police surveillance cameras at 12 schools across the country will
not be implemented by the time the school year starts on Wednesday,
police told MKs on Sunday.
During a meeting of the
Knesset's Education, Sports, and Culture Committee, police said that the
cameras, which will broadcast back to a police command center, will not
be placed in classrooms or hallways, and will be limited to gates and
schoolyards, where they can help security guards patrol the campuses.
The
plan has stirred controversy, with critics branding it a "Big Brother"
program, and others saying it attempts to replace teachers' education
and discipline with cameras. . . .(Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
What sort of problems with violence were Israeli schools encountering? Hartman writes:
According to
an Education Ministry study from 2006, "moderate physical violence"
occurred in over half of Israeli schools in 2005, while "serious
physical violence," involving injury or threats, took place in one out
of every five.
Almost half of all students described
the atmosphere in their school as violent, according to the study,
while 27.2 percent said they felt unsafe at school. In addition, 3.7% of
students reported carrying "cold weapons" such as knives to school,
while 1.5% reported carrying firearms.(Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
It's illegal for children to carry firearms in Israel; indeed, non-veterans can't obtain permits or guns until age 27. Nor are civilians as well-armed (or as often dead) as in the United States, Addicting Information's Wendy Gittleson writes:
Teachers are neither trained nor paid to be the first line of defense
against high-powered rifles. Out of one side of their mouths, the right
is cutting school funding and attacking the teachers’ union and on the
other side, they are wanting teachers to take on the responsibility of
police and military sharpshooters . . . .
In Israel, there are approximately 7.3 guns per 100 people. In 2008,
there was less than one gun homicide per 100,000 people. In the U.S.,
there are 88.8 guns per 100 people and in 2008, there were over 3 gun
homicides for each 100,000 people. Source, gunpolicy.org. This is despite the fact that some in Israel actually do live in a war zone. . . .
Israeli soldiers, police and volunteers mobilized for school security
That's another element that articles in the Jerusalem Post make clear. On September 1, 2005, staff writers Talya Halkin and Yaakov Katz reported in "Dovrat Reform debuts as schools open":
. . . Meanwhile,
thousands of policemen will deploy across the country on Thursday to
ensure that the new school year gets off to a secure and peaceful start.
Policemen,
backed up by volunteers, will patrol various carpool pickup spots,
schools and main population centers to prevent Palestinian attacks.
Soldiers will beef up the seam-line on the West Bank to prevent terrorist infiltrations.
While
police had not received concrete intelligence regarding terrorist
threats, they did not intend to take any chances, said Asst.-Cmdr. Ze'ev
Welednger, head of the Police Security Department,.
"We
do not have concrete information, but usually there is none when terror
strikes," he said. "Since we don't have intelligence reports, we get
ready for a range of scenarios that could happen and prepare ourselves
to the best of our ability."
Welednger said terrorism was not the police's only concern.
"In
addition to the terror threats, we are also prepared for the changes
people go through on the first day of school," he said. "People's moods
change since it is a day full of pressure, and we need to be there to
help everyone get to school and home safely." . . . (Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
Other than the gated schools, armed security officers, cameras, and occasionally fully mobilized military, police and civilian volunteer force, one supposes it's the teachers who decide to carry guns into Israeli schools who've prevented incidents like Ma'lat.
Indeed, at the time of the blood standard for school attacks--the Beslan, Russia, school siege, where at least 335 children and adults were killed in September 2004--security advisor Steve Albrecht wrote in a column in the San Diego Tribune, "School violence; The terrorists' new weapon here?":
Speaking at
the national conference for the Association of Threat Assessment
Professionals in Anaheim last week, Lt. Col. David Grossman, a retired
U.S. Army Ranger, foreshadowed the Chechens' attack on the school.
. . . A hush fell over the room
as Grossman reminded the group that as far back as 1974, terrorist
attacks on an Israeli school killed 21 children. As a result, schools in
Israel, starting then and certainly today, have armed soldiers, armed police, or armed security on every campus.
Israel
has taken this psychologically significant and economically difficult
step because the leaders felt they had no choice. Terrorists don't enjoy
targeting police stations and soldiers' barracks because these people
fight them with lethal violence in kind. Terrorists attack school
campuses for two undeniable reasons: children can't shoot back at them
and any incident involving violence at what is supposed to be a safe,
"protected environment," like a school, a hospital or a day care center,
creates tremendous anxiety in the nearby community. (Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
Other than the soldiers, the police, the security guards, the fenced and gated schools, the back-pack searches, the camera images piped into the local police station, sure, those teachers who choose (it's not mandatory) to carry have stopped those terrorist attacks, Representative Cornish, and that's all we need.
Or is it? Perhaps a good gauge for the tale might be the reaction of Israeli teachers and parents when they learn that the guards aren't in place. At the time of the Beslan attacks, the Post's Stuart Winer reports in "School guards leave before children go home":
As the world reels from the Beslan school massacre, a security lapse at Israeli schools was revealed on Monday.
The Union of Local Authorities (ULAI) in Israel admitted that school security guards are leaving their posts at 2 p.m. even though there are lessons that continue till 4 p.m. in many schools. . . .
. . .Although the standard school
day ends at 2 p.m., according to [Head of Security and Deputy Director-General of the ULAI Sharon] Azriel, there are some lessons that
continue till 4 p.m. in half the country's schools. . . .
. . .Chairman of
the National Parents' Association Erez Frankel called on parents to
collect their children from schools as soon at the guards leave.
"Can
you imagine a cafe owner sending home the guard when there are still
customers inside?" he said. "If there is a need for school security then
it needs to be for all the pupils all the time.". . .(Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
Pre-1991: Parent-volunters (Heckova PTA)
It's clear that Israel has increasingly beefed up security in its schools, and so it possible that the "armed teachers" narrative was born before 1991, when Israel first employed paid guards rather than having parent volunteers stand watch. Armed teachers would have been an important element at that time.
On November 30, 1990, JP staff writer Bill Hutman reported in "Every Public School To Have Armed Guards":
Trained armed guards will be
placed at all public schools within the next three months, an Education
Ministry official said yesterday. The ministry has called a meeting
today of IDF, police, and local authority officials to work out the
details. Ami Kahan, director of the ministry's security department,
said implementation will meet the February 28 deadline set by the
Knesset education committee for hiring school security guards.
Trained armed guards will be placed at all public schools within the
next three months, an Education Ministry official said yesterday.
The
ministry has called a meeting today of IDF, police, and local authority
officials to work out the details. Ami Kahan, director of the
ministry's security department, said implementation will meet the
February 28 deadline set by the Knesset education committee for hiring school security guards.
But
the Local Authorities Council, whose cooperation is necessary for the
implementation of the plan, remains opposed to the idea. Armed guards
are not necessary in all areas of the country, said Givatayim Mayor
Yitzhak Yaron, who heads the council's education committee.
Yaron
explained that trained guards were not needed in his town, for example,
because "few Arabs pass through the city." He also raised doubts
whether security companies would be willing to work in remote
settlements.
At present, parents and sometimes high
school or even elementary school pupils serve as guards. In many cases,
schools are left unguarded when parents don't show up for duty.
The
situation in kindergartens is more severe, with not even a parent-guard
system organized in some instances. Moreover, many kindergartens don't
have phones, making it difficult to call for help in case of emergency.
Last
month, in wake of the wave of violent attacks on civilians, the Knesset
education committee demanded that the ministry switch to professional
guards. Committee members severely criticized the ministry for not
implementing the recommendations to tighten school security, made over a
year ago by the Knesset-appointed Givoli commission.
Kahan noted that kindergartens are not included in the commission's recommendations.
In
Jerusalem, at the initiative of the Parents Association, over one-third
of the schools have hired security companies. The association
presented the details of their initiative to the ministry, in hope it
would be used as the basis of the nationwide plan.
The
ministry estimated that the professional guards will cost parents
around NIS 30 per year. But the cost may be two or three times higher
in development towns and remote settlements, Yaron said.
Despite the cost to parents, the National Parents Association is firmly behind the plan, chairman Moshe Mizrahi said. (Nexis All News, accessed 12.18.2012)
It can't happen here?
Since Minnesota's teachers unon endorsed Cornish in 2010, he can't be counted among the high command of education union bashers. The problems with the idea--and using Israel as analogy--are extensive. As a review of reports from the English-language Israeli press has shown, armed teachers have been an increasingly insignificant part of Israeli school security since the early 1990s.
Moreover, Israel is much smaller and much more militarized in daily life than the United States, even though our security apparatus has been transformed since the September 11, 2001 attacks. For Israeli Jews, military services is universal for those judged fit to serve; few Americans have military service and the attendant weapons training.
Perhaps the most damning things about the proposal, though, is the sense that the solutions to potential gun violence in schools are more guns, and in the hands of those we expect to teach. Let teachers teach, politicians across the spectrum say--with the exception of Tony Cornish and his kindred across the country, who also seem to want volunteer security officers.
It feels like the same old nickel and diming of the schools. security on the cheap, and lethal force handed out to those who are routinely denigrated by the political right in the state. Cornish may see this as straight shooting, but it's got the feel of blanks misfired to start out the session.
Photo: Tony Cornish, top; Union thug, bottom.
Blog begathon: Bluestem is supported by reader
contributions. If you liked this post, consider throwing some coin to
the tip jar. If you don't like using PayPal, email at the address on
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Note: Bluestem has consistently been a gun rights supporter in the past. However, like Joe Scarborough,
the Sandy Hook school shootings have prompted us to rethink our
position on gun rights and gun violence. We're looking now at what
regulations would be most effective in preventing gun violence in
America. While we get up to speed on the research, we'll be posting
guest commentary. They are the opinions of the authors, not the editor of Bluestem.
Guest commentary by Samuel Twitchell
An earlier version of this post appeared on Twitchell's Facebook page
I've read a lot of Facebook posts on the subject of gun control since Friday's tragedy, and hearing about yet another senseless
shooting spree has made me pissed off and cantankerous, so I feel I should offer my fellow lefties a word
of caution. Advice is free, and you don't have to take it:
1. There are as many firearms in the United States as there are people. If for no other reason than
practicality, banning all guns in this country is impossible. You can't put this particular genie back into the
bottle, so don't waste your time/effort/breath trying.
2. Even if it was practical, banning guns is not constitutional. The Supreme Court has already ruled on
the scope of the Second Amendment. Read that again: they already ruled. The same court that protects
the right to choose has decided that gun ownership is constitutionally protected. Don't be like those Tea
Party douches and say that only certain constitutional freedoms count.
3. Even if it were practical and constitutional, it would be stupid. A lot of studies point out that a) the
U.S. has a lot of guns, and b) the U.S. has a lot of violence. But that is correlation, not causation--which,
as you know, is a logical fallacy. Taking away guns would be the equivalent of treating a symptom and
not a disease. There are other developed countries with high percentage of gun ownership/possession-
-especially countries with compulsory military service--that have nowhere near a corresponding rate of
gun violence or deaths. We are violent, and we have a lot of guns, but these are not the same thing.
4. Focus on the real problems: our culture of violence that permeates every level of our society, our lack
of access to mental health care, and our absolute negligence in maintaining adequate regulation of gun
ownership and possession—including strong restrictions on assault weapons. We need a lot more of all
three, and these are politically feasible goals. There are a lot of people who will support these efforts, but
who will also reject you if you make it about banning guns.
5. Finally, put your efforts and political resources into addressing the real problems that contributed to
today's shootings. Don't point fingers at people you have decided not to like because they own firearms. There are twenty dead kids in Connecticut who don't care
how pure you are.
If we put half as much effort into getting results as we seem to maintaining political
orthodoxy, I'd be driving a hover car right now.
Samuel Twitchell grew up in Southern Minnesota. He has a Master’s degree in history, and is currently
pursuing a doctorate in History of Technology at Iowa State University. His wife teaches science in a Des Moines area school district.
Photos: A grieving resident of Newtown CT.
Blog begathon: Bluestem is supported by reader
contributions. If you liked this post, consider throwing some coin to
the tip jar. If you don't like using PayPal, email at the address on
this page for a snail mail address. We'll be running our twice-yearly
"bleg" though Christmas.
Note: Bluestem has consistently been a gun rights supporter. However, like Joe Scarborough, the Sandy Hook school shootings have prompted us to rethink our position on gun rights and gun violence. We're looking now at what regulations would be most effective in preventing gun violence in America. While we get up to speed on the research, we'll be posting guest opinion.
Guest post by Sean Olsen
Crossposted from Brick City Blog, Chaska
The elementary school massacre in Newton, Conn. Friday is apparently
going to prompt actual Congressional debate over potential new gun
control measures. Here’s a look at some of the options you might hear
about in the coming weeks, with some pros and cons of each:
Firearm registration:
Would require users to register all of their guns with the state.
Would facilitate tracking of guns used in crime, as well as discourage
ownership of prohibited weaponry. Would be relatively easy to avoid,
however, and viewed as a serious abridgment of Second Amendment rights.
Owner licensing and training: Would require gun
owners and purchasers to be licensed by the state. Most proposals tie
such licensing to requirements for successful completion of a gun safety
course including passing a proficiency exam. Process would likely
create additional expense for prospective gun owners.
Liability insurance: Would require gun owners to
purchase liability insurance that would cover any damages resulting from
illegal usage of the weapon. Presumably, this would discourage the
ownership of semi-automatic weapons because insurance rates would be
higher. Would make it much harder for lower-income folks to own
firearms.
Additional screening: Would subject current or
prospective gun owners to more intensive screening of their criminal and
mental health background. Would likely prevent more people with mental
health problems from obtaining weapons, but will never be 100%
successful. Also, could be considered a significant invasion of privacy
depending on what steps are involved.
Limits on magazine size: The Bushmaster .223
semi-automatic rifle used by the Connecticut shooter had a detachable
magazine that carried 30 rounds. Some have called for the limit to be
as low as six rounds, but most proposals place the number at 10 or 12
rounds as the maximum. Significant numbers of these large magazines
still exist today (and would continue to after a ban), and one could
expect a robust black market to develop.
Ban on detachable magazines: Some have called for a
ban on detachable magazines altogether, which would require rounds to
be loaded by hand instead of the quick change process facilitated by the
detachable magazine. Similar black market issues would exist with this
option.
Other limits on ammunition sales: Various options could be in play here, such as limits on the amount or type of ammunition that could be purchased.
Bans on certain types of weapons: Congressional Democrats have already indicated that they will be looking to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban
which expired in 2004 — this legislation primarily impacted
semi-automatic rifles with certain military features. Could be somewhat
effective — for instance, the AR-15 used by the Aurora, Colo. movie
theater shooter would have been banned by the law had it still been in
place. However, there were legal weapons available that provided
essentially the same function. As with some of the other options, a
robust black market would likely exist, unless the U.S. were to
undertake an effort like Australia did in the mid-1990s, spending
millions to buyback banned weapons.
The key thing to note about all of these options is that there’s no
provision here that’s going to be a magic wand. Guns are and always
will be a part of American culture. Mainstream debate (on both sides of
the political aisle) reflect the fact that no one wants to take away
the rights of law-abiding Americans to have a firearm for self-defense
and hunting. To reduce the number of tragedies like Newtown or Aurora
or Columbine or Virginia Tech is going to require changes across a
number of areas of American life — not just or not even primarily
changes in gun laws. It has to reflect that our system for treating
folks with mental illness isn’t working. It has to reflect that there
are some things very wrong with our culture. Bob Costas may have used
the wrong platform to talk about it, but we need to rethink our love
affair with firearms and begin to treat them with the respect that they
deserve. Ads like this don’t help the process along:
Photos: A grieving resident of Newtown (above); Bushmaster's man card campaign image. Bushmaster corporation website (below).
Blog begathon: Bluestem is supported by reader
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Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt not only wants armed teachers in classrooms. He wants toxic metal Christian rocker and homophobe Bradlee Dean to join them.
Pratt was interviewed by Dean sidekick Jake McAuley on Saturday's Sons of Liberty Radio show, part of a two-day rant about Sandy Hook being a "stage shooting."
Not only does Dean think that Sandy Hook was staged in order to gain publics sympathy for gun control, but his co-host spent air time with Pratt swapping Old Testament "biblical perspectives" about how God so does not want gun control.
One anti-gun control conspiracy narrative floating around--and first introduced to Bluestem by acquaintances on the very left, although the story's more present on the fringy right--is the "staged shooting" meme that predates Newtown. It's this decade's version of the "9-11 Truther" tale, though told on a less grand scale.
While the 9-11 Truthers insist that former President Bush was in on the plot to fly airplanes into the Twin Towers, the "Staged Shooting" storytellers fancy that the Obama administration is setting up the spree shootings of the past months, the better to confiscate all guns, sign the UN gun treaty, or both.
Go check both post out at Bradlee Dean Info. Here's one of the videos:
Biblical view: God ignores the weapon
After an introduction, and Pratt hold forth on the notion that gun free zones are catnip for spree shooters and the only solution is arm the victims--presumably, adults rather that first graders. Just before Dean's co-host Jake McAuley and Pratt close with a chat about how Obama will so unilaterally order gun dealers to stop stealing shit, they talk about how gun control violates God's values, using the story of Abel and Cain to establish what God wants in contemporary American gun policy.
Here's a transcript of the exchange:
JAKE: Now Larry, a lot of people listening right now are Christians and a lot of people probably aren't, but I want to give the biblical perspective, because that's what you do at Gun Owners Dot Org, you include that, which is different from some of the other gun lobbies, and I think the basis is the biblical basis of our Constitution is what insures our rights. Where it's not biblically based, it won't insure our rights, it will take them from us.
I recall the story of Cain and Abel when Cain came up to his brother and killed him. Now, it doesn't say what the weapon was, but did God say, did He legislate then at that point, okay, from now on, no more weapons for anybody?
PRATT: I think that's a very significant point. Right up front at the beginning of the history of man, we have this crime committed, and God ignores--He's obviously aware of--but He ignores whatever the weapon that was used, and He deals with Cain and He punishes Cain for what Cain did and He doesn't come back and say "And also, none of these rocks anymore, none of these plows, whatever it might have been. That's not the way you deal with crime. You deal with the recognition that the human heart is sinful, it's going to do bad things,and so you have to deal with crime from that point of view.
And that should be a lesson to our modern jurisprudence system. We shouldn't be fiddling around with whether you and I can be carrying this or that kind of a gun in this or that place in our society. We ought to be dealing with, okay, if you abuse that lethal force that you're able to carry, these will be the penalties.
JAKE: That's right, crime, God ultimately punishes crime.. .
Here's Bluestem's audio clip of the radio exchange:
How wonderful that Bradlee Dean is able to get the message of My War
into high schools around the country. Equally exciting is that he sees
students receiving his explanation of what made America free, strong and
prosperous.
Students say the assembly started well. The band played some great music and most students agreed with their message.
"They were a rock band, and they talked about music that had bad influences on kids," said high school junior Kenzley Ricklefs.
But then things took an unexpected turn. The group switched their
message from music, to negative opinions about the gay, lesbian, and
transgendered community.
"They started talking about homosexuality, and that's when I really
got offended," Manahl said. "I got a little emotional. I wanted to walk
out. But I'm like -- keep your calm, listen to what they have to say."
Then they split into smaller groups -- girls, boys, and teachers. The
guys got a lesson in the constitution and Christianity. The
conversation in the girls group was very different.
"I'm a Christian, so I believe in most of the things that they said.
Like, they talked about if you're unpure in your past, it's your past.
You can create a new future for yourself," senior Ashley Satterlee said.
Satterlee and her friends believe some of the younger kids could
learn a lot from the discussion about respecting your body and saving
yourself for marriage. But other students say this and a strong
pro-life, anti-abortion message, went too far for a public school.
"That's not something you should force down someone's throat. They
called me out because I wasn't participating because I didn't believe
what they wanted me to believe in, and they forced me to participate,"
Ricklefs said.
The superintendent said all of this is shocking and goes against his district's mission of acceptance and tolerance.
"Where did that come from? That's not what we were anticipating, and
when we called the other schools where they had been, why wasn't this
mentioned?" Stanton said. . . .
UPDATE: Four days before the school shootings, three of Dean's various twitter accounts posted Pratt's endorsements:
Photo: Larry Pratt, GOA executive director and huge Bradlee Dean fan.
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That's in the Rochester Post Bulletin, prompted by the shooting of a teen-aged girl by her grandfather in the home they shared. The board wrote in part:
. . .And now it's Rochester's turn. On Monday, a 61-year-old man mistook his 16-year-old granddaughter for a burglar and shot her with his handgun. Fortunately, she is expected to survive.
We're not going to use these tragedies as an opportunity to advocate for strict gun control, because that ship sailed a long time ago. The FBI estimates U.S. citizens own more than 200 million rifles, pistols and shotguns. While some restrictions have been placed on those who want to buy guns, people are buying firearms at a record pace this year, and the fact is if you're not a felon, those restrictions are little more than an inconvenience.
Furthermore, we'd suggest anyone who believes the U.S. government could, should or will ever attempt to take Americans' guns away from them is delusional. For better or for worse, guns and gun ownership are a part of our national heritage and culture, and that's not going to change. . . .
That was published Thursday; the paper has yet to post any editorial response to the Connecticut massacre. Part of this may be attributed as much to the paper's production schedule as to editorial reticence--nonetheless, it stands as a marker to the state of the discussion of gun control in the USA before Friday.
By three in the afternoon the next day, America's conversation had changed. Few signs of that shift are more stark than the headline on the top of the fairly conservative Owatonna People's Press editorial, Conversation on gun violence long overdue. The editors conclude:
. . .Before we jump head first
into such a debate, we should remember those people and their families.
But the discussion needs to happen. We cannot put this debate off any
longer. We, as Americans, need to sit down and have a serious discussion
about the role – and availability — of firearms in our society. As with
most important conversations, it will not be a pleasant one. It will be
divisive, it will be uncomfortable and it will most certainly be
heated. But it is necessary.
The one thing we can certainly all agree on is that none of
those 18 [sic] children deserved to die. How we move forward as a society from
this terrible tragedy, how we utilize the lessons that countless
similar tragedies have taught us, will define us a nation and as a
people.
Yes, earlier in the opinion, the editors caution how "voices on all sides of the political spectrum attempt to politicize the event in Newtown." They do not, however, ask that the debate be avoided.
Later on Friday night, the OPP's sister Huckle Media chain outlet, the Faribault Daily News, comes closer to that--though the editors stop short--with Take time to mourn the losses in Newtown, Conn.:
. . .
Tragedy is something that seems to be in abundance as of late in
America. Two people were randomly killed by a gunman at a mall in
Portland, Ore., earlier this week and sting of this past summer’s
Aurora, Colo., shooting still resonates. Dealing with a different kind
of pain, New York and the East Coast are still reeling from the
devastation of Superstorm Sandy.
As further details emerge about the shooting, definitive actions
will certainly be taken. School security plans will be reevaluated
nationwide and the long-standing gun control debate has already been
raised to a fever pitch in response to the shooting.
But before our attention is diverted to politics and rhetoric,
we ask that people take a moment to mourn the monumental losses suffered
in Connecticut. Feel sympathy and sadness for the family and friends
whose lives were forever damaged by the shooting. But most of all, take a
moment to call a loved one and tell them how much they mean to you
because in times of tragedy, they are what matter most. . .
While many on both ends of the spectrum of the gun control to gun rights debate may grow impatient with that call for mourning over action, it too is understandable, however little many of us might be inclined to soften the debate while the bodies are identified and gathered.
That impatience is captured more in the New Ulm Journal's headline: A day of horror. The Journal's board concludes:
We will hear debates about gun control in the weeks ahead. We need
the debate. Something has to be done about the vast number of guns in
this country, so many of them owned illegally, or unlicensed. Do we need
stronger laws, or stronger enforcement of our existing gun laws?
But in many cases like this, the shooters are often someone who
bought guns legally and had no prior history to indicate they should not
be allowed to own guns. Or they may steal the guns from somewhere.
As
a nation, we have gone through this experience too many times. And we
will go through it again, we fear, until we find the resolve to do
something substantive about it.
That suggests stronger action than the Bulletin editorial board--widely thought more liberal than the stolid burghers in New Ulm--would have admitted possible in the national debate two days before.
Late Saturday night, the Mankato Free Press posted Our View: School shooting is America's problem, which calls for political courage against the gun lobby. Perhaps the bolder call is simply a matter of time elapsed from the slap of the initial reports on Friday. The editorial begins:
School shootings in America should be difficult and rare, not easy and frequent.
But when most of us can name four or five of them off the top of our
heads, we should realize they have become too easy and frequent.
Jonesboro. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Now Newtown, Conn. Then add other
public places. Post offices, movie theaters, businesses, warehouses,
churches, NFL football fields. It's pretty sad when 28 dead in a school
shooting doesn't break the record. The Virginia Tech shooter claimed 32
lives.
Newtown, a city about the size of Mankato, was considered by one parent the "safest place in America."
Go read the middle at the Free Press. The editors conclude:
The [President's] politics reference was alluding to an ugly truth about our gun
violence debate in America. We seem afraid to have one at high levels of
power from state houses to the White House. . . .
Like any legitimate public affairs issue, we should debate the causes,
the effects and what makes mass shootings so easy and frequent. From
mental illness prevention to semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles,
all issues need to be on the table.
But we should also examine our own consciences. Can we continue to live
with these tragedies and be afraid of a gun lobby we know is very
powerful? Or is it time we had the courage, as Obama urges, to do
something "meaningful." . . .
The sufficient (and efficacious) grace of that word has been much contested among the tweeps, to the point that mere mortals have written, Obama, Fuck Your Tears, taking away a different meaning:
Plus, the benefit of not “capitalizing” on the tragedy is that, in a few
days, most of us will put this whole thing behind us. We have Christmas
presents to buy and trees to decorate—this is a very busy time of year!
So if you wait this one out, just kind of do the bare minimum of your
job, our outrage will probably pass, and you can avoid any of those
“usual Washington policy debates.” Those are such a yawn, amirite?
There's merit to that. The conservative Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Mark Roth dashed off Despite Obama's appeal for action, new gun control unlikely, experts say within hours of the President's speech, and many editorial boards across Greater Minnesota--notably those owned by the Forum Communications chain--have stayed silent.
For myself, I've always been a gun rights supporter as it seemed a civil liberty, but the cascade of spree shootings now makes me think that the "well-regulated" clause of the Second Amendment needs to be invoked to protect citizens from murder. As the Free Press board writes:
Like any legitimate public affairs issue, we should debate the causes,
the effects and what makes mass shootings so easy and frequent. From
mental illness prevention to semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles,
all issues need to be on the table.
Will this debate happen? And sound policy--not tears--be wrung from it? We must make it so.
Photo: A man outside of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a gunman opened fire, killing 26 people, including
20 children, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Newtown Bee, Shannon
Hicks via Huffington Post).
Blog begathon: Bluestem is supported by reader
contributions. If you liked this post, consider throwing some coin to
the tip jar. If you don't like using PayPal, email at the address on
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Are non-citizens voting in Minnesota? Allegedly in two precincts in Austin, three people who were not eligible to vote registered and cast ballots on November 6.
Two brothers in Austin, Minn., who have permanent resident status in
the U.S. but aren't citizens, have been charged with voter fraud.
The felony charge is: ineligible voter who knowingly voted.
William
and Braulio Manzano, who spoke to police with the help of an
interpreter, had checked the box on their voter application to indicate
that they were not U.S. citizens, but then filled out the rest of the
application and signed a line that said they are citizens, says the Austin Daily Herald.
And they told police that they had voted in the election. . . .
Two of three Austin residents who allegedly voted illegally
at Ellis Middle School on Election Day have each been charged as an
ineligible voter who knowingly voted, a felony.
Brothers
William and Braulio Manzano were each charged Friday, Nov. 30, in Mower
County Court. According to the court complaints, the brothers each
checked the boxes on their voter applications that indicate they are not
U.S. citizens. However, both men continued to fill out their
applications and signed the portion that indicates they are citizens who
can vote and that providing false information is a felony offense
punishable by up to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
An
officer and interpreter spoke with the brothers, who both admitted they
are not naturalized citizens but have permanent resident status with
Minnesota identification cards.
Braulio admitted to
voting, according to the court complaint, because he didn’t understand
the application and didn’t know he had to be a naturalized citizen to
vote. . .
Three Austin men were charged Friday with voter fraud from the Nov. 6 election, which is a felony offense.
Jacob Awuol Barac and brothers William and Braulio Manzano all filled out same-day registration forms incorrectly, which slipped by election judges, before casting their ballots. All three checked the box saying they were not citizens of the United States before filling out the rest and signing the portion that says they were, in fact, U.S. citizens.
Each is facing up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
It's the first time since at least 1989 that Mower County has had issues with voter fraud, Mower County Auditor-Treasurer Doug Groh said.
"The election process needs to be tightened up," Groh said Nov. 21 after the illegal ballots were discovered during the election review.
Analysis of the case
The articles spurred a couple of questions. What were the "Minnesota identification cards" the brothers held? Who checks the registration forms? Finally, if the brothers had not checked the box indicating that they weren't citizens, would they have been caught? Would those people registering before elections have their status reviewed?
Bluestem obtained copies of the criminal complaints from the Mower County Courthouse. Both complaints (50-CR-12-2859 and 50-CR-12-2860) included Defendant Fact Sheets listing the men's "Minnesota identification cards." After some checking, we confirmed that these are valid drivers' licenses, legally obtained (lawful permanent residents, while not citizens, can obtain licenses).
Thus, this wasn't a case that requiring a state-issued photo ID to vote would have solved, unless the election officials paid more attention than they did under current law to both the registration form--and the licenses' status information. The men had valid, legal, state-issued photo id--what they didn't have in order to be eligible to vote was citizen status.
Since the information on their registration forms conflicted, the election judges ought to have caught the problem before the ballots were cast. As it is, the problem was discovered when the ballots were examined, and the men are facing the very serious consequences of their actions.
What if the men had not checked the first box? Would the felony have been detected? The answer is a qualified yes. The Department of Public Safety Driver and Vehicle Services monthly
shares citizen status check information from driver’s licenses, permits
and identification cards with the Secretary of State’s office’s voting
database to determine if non-citizens have registered to vote (and perhaps voted).
The legislative history
In a 2010 bipartisan election reform bill that was introduced by Ryan Winkler in the House (and co-sponsored by Republicans Mary Kiffmeyer and Laura Brod), this language was added to Minnesota statute that requires comparison of electronic data on citizenship to be compared to records in the
Sec. 12. [201.158] USE OF DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY DATA. As required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, Public Law 107-252, the commissioner of public safety shall make electronic data on citizenship available to the secretary of state. The secretary of state must determine whether the data newly indicates that any individuals who have active records in the statewide voter registration system are not citizens. The secretary of state shall prepare a list of those voters for each county auditor. The county auditor shall change the status of those registrants in the statewide voter registration system to reflect that they are challenged based upon their citizenship and must notify the county attorney. In 2010, the secretary of state must make the determination and provide lists to the county auditors between 30 and 60 days before the general election and again between six and ten weeks after the election. In 2011, the secretary of state must make this determination again as part of the annual list maintenance. By August 1, 2012, the secretary of state must provide electronic lists to the counties at least monthly.
The bill changed state statute, though less formal measures had been tried prior to the bipartisan law's passage.
Citizenship Verification – The Governor is directing
the Department of Public Safety Driver and Vehicle Services to routinely
share citizen status check information from driver’s licenses, permits
and identification cards with the Secretary of State’s office’s voting
database to determine possible voter fraud. Minnesota will be one of the
only states in the country to verify voters’ citizenship status.
This is the process that became later became law in 2010, though prior to Pawlenty's directive, attempts were made to require that those registering to vote would have to document their citizenship.
In the 84th Legislature (2005-2006), Tom Emmer (HF1443) and then-state Senator Michele Bachmann (SF923) introduced companion bills that would have required Minnesotans to provide proof of citizenship when they registered to vote, along with other changes to election law.
However, the citizenship documentation portion was stricken from the Emmer bill on May 9, 2006, just before the final version was approved by the Republican-controlled House on a 71-62 vote. DFLers Mary Ellen Otremba and Lyle Koenen voted for it, along with all Republicans voting.
The bill was sent to the Senate, where it died in the Elections Committee after being introduced by Bachmann and former Senator Maddy Reiter--the fate of their own bill, SF923, introduced in February 2005 and quickly dispatched to the elections committee.
Indeed, Bachmann was responsible for earlier versions of the legislation, which lacked a House companion bill until Tom Emmer showed up. As far as Bluestem is able to determine, Bachmann was first to bring the notion to the Minnesota Senate, introducing SF 1011 on February 22, 2001 with Republican co-authors Roy Terwilliger and Mark Ourada; Independence Party Senator Sam Lessard added his name to the bill in March (a former DFL, Lessard had switched parties in 2000).
Other states have passed laws requiring that those registering to vote document their citizenship, but some voting right groups estimate that up to 7 percent of Americans lack the documents that prove they are citizens. It's viewed as form of voter restriction.
Had the election judges been more alert in two precincts in Austin, it's unlikely the men would have faced charges, just a stern talking to before being asked to hit the road. As it is, they were caught and face felony charges.
And that might get them in big trouble with ICE, which frowns on felony crimes of moral turpitude. As the Immigration Policy Center notes, it's not just undocumented immigrants who get deported, but lawful permanent residents who are convictedof crimes as well.
Will prosecutions be a deterrent for others lawful permanent residents considering voting illegally? Given the difficulty of obtaining lawful status, it's not a difficult question to answer.
Photo: Voting is for eligible voters.
Blog begathon: Bluestem is supported by reader
contributions. If you liked this post, consider throwing some coin to
the tip jar. If you don't like using PayPal, email at the address on
this page for a snail mail address. We'll be running our twice-yearly
"bleg" though Christmas.
All of the statements, opinions, and views expressed on this site by Sally Jo Sorensen are solely her own, save when she attributes them to other sources.
The opinions, statements, and views of contributing writers are their own.
Sorensen, editor and proprietor of Bluestem Prairie, served as a New Media training and strategy consultant for the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from October 2009 through mid-April 2010. She now serves clients in the business and nonprofit sectors.
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