Sam Sutter is unfit for office

What do you call a district attorney who won't prosecute a crime because he agrees with the political cause of the defendants?

Corrupt.

Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter has dropped criminal charges against a pair of environmentalists who anchored a boat to block a shipment of coal bound for a power plant in Somerset Massachusetts, opting instead to fine them each $2,000 to pay back the Somerset and State police departments.

The two defendants are global warming activists and Sutter is a big supporter of climate change prevention.

“Because of my sympathy with their position, I was in a dilemma,” Sutter said afterward. “I have a duty to go forward to some extent with this case and to follow the applicable case law, but they were looking for a forum to present their very compelling case about climate change.”

Sutter is claiming the "necessity defense," which is normal reserved for immediate threats, and that the fines were sufficient punishment for breaking the law. He said charges weren't dropped, but were reduced to a civil infraction.

Kudos to NPR reporter Robin Young for asking Sutter about the dangerous precedent this set:

What if somebody who is anti-abortion dropped charges against people who stormed an abortion rights center, or prevented people from coming into that center?

Sutter dodged this question by saying the charges weren't dropped, just reduced. He then said the abortion clinic example involves "risk to others" and is therefor different.

He doesn't think people opposed to abortion believe there is a risk to others involved? The hypothetical anti-abortion prosecutor will say people are being directly killed right away. If anything, that's closer to the necessity defense than this case.

It must be great for the police to get some money back for the resources they wasted getting these protesters out of the way, but what about the coal company that was harmed by their actions? Doesn't that company deserve normal legal protections or compensation?

Sam Sutter is unfit for office. He's correct that man-made climate change is a real issue that needs to be addressed somehow, but by inappropriately excusing criminal actions and playing utilitarian games he has failed in his sworn duty to uphold the law.

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Wendy Davis's filibuster and its aftermath

After a lot of reading this is what I've pieced together as the substance around Texas state Senators Wendy Davis's 11 hour filibuster:

The New York Times wrote that the bill: "...Sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital."

The vote was held during a special session which had to end at midnight and it's implied it can not be brought up again until the next legislative session.

Texas rules say a filibuster can be stopped if the speaker sits down or wanders off topic three times. Republicans argue Davis went off topic for the third time when she spoke about sonogram requirements, which were not part of the bill but have been used elsewhere. They also said it was against the rules when someone fitted her with a back brace to make standing easier.  Using that procedure it appears the GOP stopped her filibuster at about 9:45 p.m.

Democrats then asked procedural questions to delay for an additional two hours.

With 15 minutes to go, an unruly mob in the gallery started a constant roar of screams and shouts to make it so no officials could vote on the issue and be heard. This was referred to by protesters as a "people's filibuster." The officials tried to vote anyways and were not able to finish their vote until a few minutes after midnight, which means it didn't count. 

GOP lawmakers then appeared to change the computer records to show the vote took place before midnight.

I'm against legislature disguised as safety regulations that try to shut down abortion clinics, but I'm also against rioters and angry mobs overruling elected officials. The filibuster was a legitimate tactic. The procedural delay was a legitimate tactic. The mob disruption was not and those people deserve to be jailed for disrupting the vote.

The Republicans deserve criticism for trying to change the computer records, but it pales in comparison to what the angry mob did.

The disturbing thing is I expect we will see widespread accolades for Davis, major criticism of the Republicans for trying to manipulate the time stamp, and dead silence about the people who disrupted a legitimate legislative session to cheat the democratic process.
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A pox on both your houses

Maine elected officials had a recent dust-up with the Bangor Daily News over concealed weapons holder data and both sides displayed armor-piercing grade arrogance.

Disclosure time: I was an intern for the BDN and I have friends that work there. As a result, I witnessed a more shrill tone from private communications than what Maine's second largest newspaper presented publicly.

The BDN made a legal request this month for the personal information of concealed weapons permit holders in the state. This includes names, ages and addresses. Under a Maine law passed in 1985, the state was required to hand the information over.

However, it didn't. Officials and critics referenced the time in December when a New York newspaper posted an interactive map of concealed weapon permit holders; presumably to capture more of the criminal reader demographic by "casing the joint" for them. This put a lot of people at risk, especially people without concealed weapons who were labeled easy targets.

I believe the BDN editors when they say they had no intention to produce such a map, a move they called "irresponsible." They wanted to use it in an analysis. Sadly, this is where they went wrong.

The attitude of BDN staff was that it was blindly irrational for the public to criticize their request because they honestly, truly weren't going to print it. One of my BDN friends posted on Facebook that the point of newspapers was always to "gather" information.

No it isn't, the point is to publish information, not hold secret data banks for our own records.

What irks me is the naive way the BDN expects trust to work. Trust must be earned, it can not be commanded or expected automatically. As a reporter I constantly have to earn the trust of people I wish to interview. Many of them have been burned by a reckless reporter in the past and they will hold that grudge forever.

Wasn't "Just trust us" the mentality of the Bush administration? The public is right to be distrustful of such attitudes.

The BDN editorials skew left and it's no surprise that gun lovers would take issue with the BDN obtaining their personal information. Just look what the BDN did intend to do with the data:

The BDN requested the records of concealed weapons permits as part of long-term reporting projects on domestic violence, sexual assault and drug abuse... We intend to use this information about permits, along with other information sets we are gathering, to analyze possible correlations relevant to our reporting projects.

With that sort of framing there's no way this could look good for concealed weapons holders. Newsrooms contain very few mathematicians and even newspapers as big as the New York Times make absurd Naomi Klein-style errors in their attempts at breaking down data. If the BDN analysis made concealed weapons holders look bad, it would run on the front page. If it didn't, the story could be "killed" or buried inside the paper.

Emergency legislation went too far

I can't blame law-abiding members of the public for objecting when a corporation wants their personal information. I can, however, blame Gov. Paul LePage, the house and senate for passing unethical legislation in response.

Even though the BDN caved to pressure and withdrew the data request, LePage pushed emergency legislation to make concealed weapons permit data private. I don't have a problem with that, but the legislation was applied retroactively and was stated as such before the BDN withdrew. I have a serious problem with that.

The BDN made a completely legal request and state law required public officials to hand it over. Retroactive legislation is sinister as it takes legal actions performed by members of the public and makes them illegal, inviting unpredictable results. I would like to see the data in question made private, but that should have been done decades ago and it was too late once the request was filed.

The state also got an e-mail request for the data when the issue got big and the retroactive rule impacted that request. It's plausible that the BDN would not have withdrawn the request if the insidious retroactive portion was not announced the day before.

By the way, the Democrats have a slight majority in both the house and senate The senate voted 33 in favor of LD 576 and 0 opposed. The house voted 129 in favor and 11 opposed. This is not just an issue of LePage and his pistol-packing GOP posse behaving badly. This is almost everyone in Augusta acting out.
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The open borders club is always recruiting

I was happy to learn today that Fox news regular and former judge Andrew Napolitano is a proponent of open borders immigration.

It took me years to get here, but I proud to support making America a nation where anyone who wants to can live here. When I moved from Maine to Massachusetts I didn't have to get permission from the grand temple of residency bureaucrats (I wish I could say the same thing about my car) so why should it be different for someone escaping Venezuelan socialism? The only restrictions should be on dangerous criminals.

People who worry that immigrants will "take our jobs" are simply engaging in protectionism. If a competitor can make a superior product, what difference does it matter what side of an imaginary line the factory is on? Why should it matter if workers must cross that same imaginary line on their way to the factory?

The one difference I have with other immigration supporters is that I do not support making it harder to enforce our immigration laws, as stupid and harmful as they are. These measures include giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, in-state college tuition, blocking police officers from checking on the immigration status of suspects or declining to deport criminals.

The answer to bad laws is to change them, not to weasel around and leave them on the books.

Milton Friedman was talking about the positive impact from illegal immigrants when he spoke of the problem  of "bad laws [that] make socially advantageous acts illegal, and therefor leads to an undermining of morality in general."

Not enforcing bad laws opens the door to arbitrarily ignoring laws and finally ignoring good laws. I want free and open immigration for everyone, including people who are poor or have few skills. That's why we need to hurry up and change the laws we have, not ignore them.
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Fringe feminists oppose free speech

I had to stop myself from titling this entry "Feminism isn't a religion, it's a cult" because I started writing immediately after I watched the following video from the University of Toronto:




Feminist activists tried to stop men's rights and gender equality author Warren Farrall from speaking at the school defaced and removed promotional posters and blocked audience members from entering the venue until police forcibly removed them. They also assaulted police and harassed people who tried to enter.

I realize that the brutes who staged this violent protest do not represent all of feminism. That's why I wouldn't let myself use that pointed title I first came up with. However, the protesters who blocked the doors did behave like cultists. One of the hallmarks of cults is shutting out the influence of outside messages. That's exactly what they did here, try to block other students from hearing a message they don't like.

The target of these protests wasn't just Farrell, it was also the public. In a summary of the fundamentals of freedom of speech, Christopher Hitchens said:

It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.

Hitchens went on to ask who would the listener entrust the great responsibility to decide what they should be allowed to listen to or read. The implied answer was no one.

Watching that video, I can't say that I would appoint a group of ignorant, self-righteous, close-minded angry fanatics to decide what I can hear.

I find it frustrating when someone tries to dismiss a thinker based on something tangential they said that is separate from the important ideas they contributed. Last week I tried reading what progressive writer Corey Robin had to say about Friedrich Hayek, but he was more interested in alerting people to Hayek's embarrassing support of Augustus Pinochet than to address any of his major ideas. This is a sign of a hack, and it's telling that the Toronto protesters focused on a single line Farrell wrote in 1993's The Myth of Male Power.

Farrell had criticized watering down the definition of "date rape" to include cases where women say "no," then change their mind and engage in sexual activity without verbally declaring "yes." Farrell was critical of labeling this as "rape" because no unwanted sexual activity occurred. Instead, the sexual partners did not follow a protocol established by certain activists. He then wrote "We have forgotten that before we began calling this date rape and date fraud, we called it exciting."

That's where the out-of-context quotes of saying Farrell supports date rape come from. They have no interest in understanding his message, they just want an excuse to shut him down.

It is customary to blame media bias when stories like this fails to capture much media attention, even though reporters where there when it happened. I try not to make jump to those conclusions when a story like this fails to spread, but I would bet money that if this was a Christian group shutting down Dan Savage from trying to speak using the same forceful tactics it would be all over the news.

Is there anyone who would find tactics like this acceptable when used against a speaker they agree with?

These activists are brutes. They are so absolutely sure that their world view is correct that they are willing to stomp all over the rights of others to silence their opponents. This is fanaticism and it has no place in a civilized society.
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The fetish of breaking the law

It was December 2008, back when the American left was smiling itself to sleep every night that Barack Obama had been elected and would be able to fix most of America's problems in his first term, when environmental extremist Tim DeChristopher infiltrated an auction for oil-drilling land. He won 13 bids and drove up the prices on others. I remember reading an alternative weekly at the time that implied DeChristopher believed he would get a pardon from the new president.

Well, he got a felony conviction instead. Unfortunately, he only received a two year sentence and is now free, despite the untold amount of damages he inflicted.

Every left wing loon has praised DeChristopher for his so-called civil disobedience, which has come to mean a willingness to commit crimes because one thinks their personal value judgments makes them above the law and traditional moral values.

For what it's worth, President Obama can not be understood as a far-left extremist because people like Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein show how out there they can be. She saw fit to get arrested on purpose to draw attention to herself, hoping the public would assume she is being arrested merely for her political views and not trying to storm into a building where the president is located or aiding "human shields" who hold themselves hostage to block work crews. And that was just in the past month.

I'm written before how the American left likes to fantasize that they are in a good versus evil struggle like the civil rights movement was, and will justify engaging in civil disobedience not over racist laws but anything they disagree with, even if it involves violence against innocent people. They don't just see getting arrested as a means to an end, they revel in it. It reminds me of what Bryan Caplan said that the protagonist of Crime and Punishment was a Leninist because of, among other things, his:

Eager, poetic embrace of the implication that mass murder is conceivably morally justified; indeed, morally required.

The big problem with this rush to break any law that stands in the way is that sometimes these people have a warped view of reality and the greater evil they think they are fighting turns out not to exist, leaving them to commit crimes in a way that does not actually benefit the greater good. Steven Pinker hit upon this idea as well:

...there are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis: if your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world? 

 Well, as much as much as you want, and you're always ahead of the game. The benefits always outweigh the costs. Moreover, imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for a perfect world and just don't get with the program. They might oppose you in bringing heaven to earth. How evil are they? They're the only things standing in the way of an infinitely good Earth. Well, you do the math.  

When people believe their political positions allow them to transcend the morals of following the law, no matter what level of severity that takes, they are committing a major act of hubris. They don't think the rules apply to them anymore because they know something everyone else doesn't. Sadly, there is nothing stopping fools from reaching these conclusions and acting on them.
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A better mayoral letter to Chick-Fil-A

I've been surprised by the lack of nuance among my fellow gay marriage supporters. Many fellow supporters of gay rights have been applauding a notorious letter Boston Mayor Tom Menino send to Dan Cathy, president of the Chick-Fil-A fried chicken franchise, who recently revealed that he opposes gay marriage.

In his letter Menino wrote he had heard Cathy was looking to expand into Boston and added "There is no place for discrimination on Boston's Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it." He told the Boston Herald “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult — unless they open up their policies.”

What Menino was threatening to do is illegal. Public officials do not have the ability to cast out businesses or residents merely because of political views they hold. This is hostility to the rule of law and while I can understand applauding the mayor for standing up for gay rights, I am sickened to see support for his thuggish boasts. This is the left-wing equivalent of the 2010 "Ground Zero Mosque" debacle.

 Menino has since taken back his threats, but he wouldn't have had to if he'd written a more thoughtful letter. This is what that letter should have said.

To Dan Cathy,

I recently became aware that you are a vocal critic of gay marriage, but also have an interest in opening a location in our fair city of Boston.

As you are probably aware, Boston is the capital of the first state to legalize gay marriage. I speak for the majority of our residents when I say we are proud of our support for equal marriages rights. I was so moved by the issue that I personally stood at City Hall Plaza to greet loving couples as they came here to be married on that historic day.

Despite our differences in opinion, I want to assure you that as a public official I will do everything my office requires to clear the way to our open, tolerant city should you decide to come here. If you file the correct paperwork and meet all of our rules and regulations, I will not allow any arbitrary roadblocks to stand in your way. If you open a Boston location, our police officers will protect your business just like any other one. You will be treated with the dignity and respect all members of our community deserve by the city government.

However, as a private citizen I will oppose you in thought, word and action. I will not patronize your restaurant on any occasion, and I will urge any neighbor looking for a quick fried chicken meal to choose Kentucky Fried Chicken instead. If there are demonstrations outside the store, I may pick up a sign denouncing you and what you stand for. If anyone asks for my personal opinion, I will proudly say I hope no one buys a single nugget from you. That is my right as an American.

Rest assured, if you choose to come to Boston you will be greeted with tolerance. However, if it's acceptance you seek, you won't find it within city limits.

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Procedural liberalism requires consistency

I've been reading about "procedural liberalism" and the idea that all members of a just society must play by the rules, and I'm having trouble reconciling this with the actions and philosophy of the American left.

As I wrote last time, some members of the left purposely break the law to get arrested, then present themselves as martyrs. If you trespass while shouting to legalize human-onion marriage, you are not a victim of interkingdom romance puritanism. Your freedom of speech has not been trampled. You are simply someone who tried to hang out where they're not allowed to hang out.

"I Am Not Moving" is the title of the obnoxious video comparing Occupy Wall Street protesters to Arab Spring protesters, which is like comparing George of the Jungle to Tarzan. Despite this stern title, when you violate a no-trespass order and the blue-shirted union workers with black boots and billy clubs come for you, you are in fact moving.

If you supporting breaking the law as part of a protest, from mild civil disobedience to property destruction and rioting, then you can no longer claim to be a procedural liberal. My point is not that something is immoral or bad because the legislature had declared it illegal - Bryan Caplan has already destroyed that view - but that once you've thrown that out the window, you have lost all claim to the philosophy of respecting fair procedures.

Not that the left has any claim to greater respect for the rule of law or fair procedures. Former President George W. Bush certainly broke his share of laws, but President Barack Obama instructed the Justice Department not to defend a law he doesn't like. Sure, that law was a federal ban on gay marriage, but that's not the way we do things here. The correct answer to bad legislature is to change it, not break it or ignore it.

The reason we should follow written legislation is that it is a contract of rules to follow. I don't like our strict immigration laws and I want to see them relaxed, but I can't find myself getting worked up because a public school wants to only accept pupils that are legal residents, or a police agency wants to check if a suspect was violating immigration laws. The government should be bound to follow the law.

Procedural liberalism is lumped in with concepts the left claims to hold a monopoly on, like fairness and justice. They want no such things. To the left, fairness means handicapping someone who plays by the rules.

If a white male student works and studies hard, affirmative action proponents say he should have a tougher time getting into a particular college than a black student. This is being purposely unfair to individuals to attempt to create fairness in totality. They assume they have overcome the Hayekian knowledge problem and have perfect information so they can balance the scales flawlessly. In fact, they throw out the natural fairness of the world and impose a flawed attempt at artificial fairness. Neither approach is actually fair, but one incorrectly claims to be.

The same thing carries over to wealth "redistribution," limiting corporate speech, eminent domain and retroactively banning Wall Street bonuses from bailout money. People have a nasty habit of supporting the rules when it suits them, and abandoning them when they don't. The right is just as guilty of this, but it never branded itself the defender of fairness.

You can't claim to be a defender of consistent procedures and equal observation of the rules and still break the law when it helps your political goals. That is the mark of barbarism, not liberty. It's entirely possible that there are members of the left who reject law-breaking protests, inconsistent judicial actions and the handicapping of the innocent, but they have been drowned out by the rest.
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