All hail, his [what's his title?]

I had been wondering about what we should now call our distinguished governor. I [and a few others] have used Governor Plenty, but that really is just a cheap shot based on a name, not a name which really reveals any particular insight into the person being named.

But his decision announced yesterday unallot and avoid legislative processes, evading normal legislative processes [about the closest thing allowed to a coup d’état allowed under Article IV of the US Constitution] tells us that he should be given a better title.

There is a post on the blog “Liberal in the Land of Conservative” which suggests the title “King Pawlenty.” I understand the thinking, but wonder whether that is the best title. King tends to suggest he obtained his power by inheritance, rather than by seizure. “Tsar” presents similar problems and even His Excellency does not have that level of power. The nature of this assumption of power seems more worthy of a “Generalissimo” but, despite playing commander-in-chief when the National Guard is deployed, he is not military enough. “Shah” seems just too strange to Western tastes. “Fuehrer” seems more appropriate to the way His Excellency, the governor, has assumed his power, but we cannot think of the word without thinking of Hitler and genocide and whatever his flaws.

I think I need to think a bit and welcome anybody’s suggestions.

Meanwhile, Senjum and Marty Seifert [“Sir Punisher”] and other legislative sycophants stood by His Excellency in front of that ornate mantle where governors haven given us their pronouncements on pretty much everything for years.

And I think my suggestion which I have raised several times for one weekly legislative session per month instead of 120 days concentrated in winter and spring has even more merit. [To be fair to CCM readers, I have never posted that here. I had intended to put it in after the legislative session was over and a better post mortem could be done and I probably will. In the meantime, you can dig out your slide rules and calculate 5x12x2.]

Inland grandstanding on open-seas piracy

I once thought that Marty Seifert was one of the reasonable Republicans but that misconception disappeared quite a while back. There is a shortage of reasonable people in both parties in our legislature at this time.

He got so far out in right field, especially in his immigrant-baiting that Rubén Rosario of the DPP called him “Sir Punisher.” He could not wait to try to make an issue of it when an immigrant here illegally was charged with vehicular homicide after last year’s school bus accident near Marshall.

And even though the most extensive ballot recount in Minnesota history has failed to deduce any evidence of voter fraud, he is leading the state push for the national GOP goal of requiring photo identification for all voters.

[Click the label “Marty Seifert” on the right side of this page for earlier Marty Seiffert articles.]

Now, he apparently wants to take on organizations which attempt to make sure that non-citizen defendants in criminal cases receive full legal protection and the presumption of innocence that comes with it, specifically by denying public grants and tax-exempt status to such organizations.

This seems to have been triggered by the case of Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, alleged to be the only surviving hijack attempter on the Maersk Alabama, who was arraigned in Federal Court in New York yesterday. Seifert’s target is assumed to be the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, whose director has stated that his organization has no position on the guilt or innocence of Mr. Muse, that his organization had been contacted Muse’s family and that his organization is merely trying to help the family understand the US legal system.

Seifert seems to be one of those who think that if people cannot pronounce the prevailing language that they shouldn’t be here. We might infer that being haled into federal court is not sufficient reason to accommodate a failure to speak the prevailing language.

But the ones who say “if they’re going to be here they better speak our language” and who have little but contempt for those who don’t really do not have much argument here, anyway, since Muse only came here as a prisoner. We brought him and we are not in a position to let him have time to learn US language, law, and judicial processes, so maybe Rep. Seifert and those who think like him need to back off on this one, anyway.

DPP article [from AP]

Minnesota lawmaker: No funds to pirate lovers

The real secret ballot question

The generous and benevolent people who run the country’s companies [aka management] went to a lot of effort to see that we learned of the need for employees to have secret ballots in union organizing endeavors. There were labor and DFL types who did not agree that such a secret ballot was in peril.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the attempts of Marty Seifert and others [mainly Republicans] to demand photo identification for voting, noting the likely inherent pro-GOP such a disenfranchisement might bring about.

However I noted then that I would be posting about a possible source of abuse which practices now encouraged by DFLers and Democrats have come to embrace. That practice is absentee voting.

Only a ballot which has never been out of the presence of two or more judges of different parties can be really considered to have an assurance of privacy. When you get to a voting station on election day [or at an early voting location] two or more judges of different party give you your ballot which has been examined and initialed by two or more judges of different party and you take it to a booth and fill it out. You place the completed ballot into a secrecy folder and insert it into the counter yourself. If the machine is not working there are procedures established to place it into a sealed compartment where judges, again from different parties, will process it and others similarly placed there when the gizmo is working again.

After the machine prints its totals in the evening, the ballots are removed, sealed, and sent to an election office always in the presence of two or more judges of different parties.

There may be an occasional screw up but these are few and can happen with absentee ballots too.

What makes most absentee ballots [there are exceptions such as when judges take ballots to hospitals or nursing homes] so vulnerable to attacks on its privacy is clearly that any ballot spends a good amount of time out of the custody of the election judges and officials.

Back to the comment on union elections: Remember the campaign spot which showed somebody who was designed to bring to mind a gangster-type union official welcoming a poor voter in to vote? Just imagine how that could work out when it is just you the voter, your boss and a piece of paper. And if a boss is not intimidating, what about a spouse? or a mother-in-law? or your clergyperson? or whoever strikes terror in you?

Before this year’s election there was concern about the “Bradley factor,” the idea that people might profess tolerance but not carry it out in the ballot box. Can we speculate what might happen if the guys at the lodge decided to have a “ballot party”?

Maybe we should eliminate absentee voting or at least limit it to the most extreme circumstances [e.g., military, public officials whose jobs put them elsewhere]. If people think this unfair, maybe we could make early voting more common.

No picture, no vote?

The closeness of the Coleman-Franken election has prompted Marty Seifert to come out with another attempt to require producing photo identification as a qualification to vote. A Minnpost article by Marisa Helms [which also addresses other election matters] notes that Seifert and the House GOP consider the matter high-priority and says that his caucus will “push the envelope” for this “simple reform.”

Of course, the fact that this requirement would be so simple and would be hardest on people who are less affluent and who move with the most frequency would certainly not be in the mind of somebody as fair-minded as Mr. Seifert. I am certain that he would consider this pure coincidence.

He also notes that one has to show an ID to get on an airplane or buy a beer. While I am not sure that I agree with that even that amount of personal invasion, it should be noted that traveling and drinking and participating in our civic, governmental processes are different things and rally cannot be compared. We have no law now which requires the possession of identification and we should all be concerned that as we demand photo identification for ever more things that we are approaching the time when we will find ourselves having to carry internal passports, something the libertarian faction of any party must shudder about.

It should be noted that until about a quarter century ago that a voter’s registration card was present at each precinct and the judges had the opportunity to check the voter’s signature with the signature on the card. I do not know why that safeguard was ceased and I know that if used that it would likely have different results than photo ID, but it seems that it could address some of Seifert’s concerns and not require the presentation of the ID card.

But we know that everybody’s concerns about fairness in election depends on perspective.

There will be another post soon on one of the possible sources for abuse that DFL people seem to like.

Earlier posts on Marty Seifert can be seen by clicking the label "Marty Seifert." Two posts of interest are

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/well-now-we-know-how-much-time.html [3/3/08]

and

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/rosario-seifert-is-sir-punisher.html [3/10/08]

And once a Maverick was a cheap Ford [not entirely a pun]

Well, some of the vengeance that Pawlenty and company wanted on the Override Six had come about and more likely will. It seemed very strange for Republicans to go against other Republicans for doing the will of the Chamber of Commerce.

And now Pawlenty’s national party wants to glorify mavericks.

Interesting.

More about the jury system OR And justice for all -- the low-cost way

I wrote about our jury system a bit recently when I posted on the forthcoming reduction of pay for jurors in Minnesota District Courts.

We all know that the jury system is not perfect and I suppose that this reduction will not make it any more perfect.

I recently had the opportunity [??] of serving as a juror in the Second Judicial District [i.e., Ramsey County]. I was not selected to be on any jury.

I did get to fill out a questionnaire for the Foster case, but they managed to select a jury before they got around to interviewing me. It is probably just as well as I suspect that I knew [or at least thought I knew] too much before hand to be a fair and impartial juror.

Now a jury has been impaneled in Kandiyohi County to hear the case against Olga Franco for the accident with the school bus which killed four children and unleashed the expected bigotry from Governor Plenty and Marty Seifert. [Previous posts: first, second]

I wish them well.

When I was in college I studied both American History and American Government and we learned about the various checks and balances in our system. Two of the lesser mentioned ones are the executive pardon and jury nullification. The former usually does not get much mention until January 21 of presidential inauguration years [Scooter Libby, Alfredo Gonzalez and who else next year? Cheney?] and I would bet that many people had never heard of the latter before the O.J. Simpson case. But they are important.

A jury returned what probably was the only verdict it could in the Foster case. Those who are convinced that justice was served poorly can only hope that there will be a Higher Court later on.

Jim Ragsdale of the DPP wrote about the Foster case on Sunday’s editorial page. I commend it to your attention. As he noted,

Aaron Foster was found "not guilty" of third-degree, unintentional murder. That is not the verdict Barbara Winn's relatives wanted, and they understandably erupted after it was read in court. Nor did it fit the "cold-case" narrative the Winn-Foster matter had acquired in the media, including a moving program on "Dateline NBC" in May titled "Justice for Barbara."

But it was a reasonable verdict based on the remaining evidence of Winn's death in her Maplewood home in 1981. It was a splash of cold water on our faces, reminding us the courtroom has its own rules and ethics, chief among them that the prevailing narrative doesn't matter. What matters is the evidence; the presumption of innocence for anyone charged of a crime; and the need to prove a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt" before sending a defendant off to prison.

Those standards protect us all but do little to assuage the pain felt by children who lost a mother and who feel her killer got off.

Some people suspected that the whole matter was brought up so late as a result of Bill Finney challenging Lord Fletcher for sheriff two years ago. There is not doubt that Finney’s reputation has been smirched and this verdict will not clear that up. Ragsdale notes that Finney has said that he feels damaged and that he did nothing wrong.

The final paragraph of Ragsdale’s column seems a fair summary of the whole matter, at least as far as judicial matters are concerned,

That is where the story begins and ends — with the tragic death of Barbara Winn. The cold-case narrative did not end where the momentum was pushing it — to a conviction. But the jury was not part of a TV program. They made a tough call based on the facts presented to them, and that's why we stand when they walk past us.

We can only hope that the folks in Willmar can reach the right conclusion about Ms. Franco.

Of course they won’t be able to do that unless the lawyers on both sides give their best efforts and the judge keeps things fair.

And those $10/day jurors will be earning their pay.

People want to work. What’s so bad about that?

It is not local and not even in Minnesota, but the recent ICE raid of Agriprocessor, Inc. in northern Iowa near Postville has received a fair amount of local attention.

More than 400 people were detained and taken elsewhere to be held. His Eminence, Jerome Hanus, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dubuque has condemned the raid.

And it happened while the United Food & Commercial Workers were conducting an organizing drive.

What a coincidence!

So workers’ families are disrupted and their children’s educations endangered. What do you suppose will happen to the employers who will benefit from this bit of federally- sanctioned and implemented union busting?

People want to work. What’s so bad about that?

And if it had happened here, can you imagine how much fun Pawlenty and Seifert would have had?

Rosario: Seifert is "Sir Punisher"

In a Sunday column DPP columnist Rubén Rosario has pronounced Marty Seifert, the immigrant-baiting, mind our party line Republican leader in the Minnesota House of Representatives to be “Sir Punisher.”

He comments on his past attempt to take dessert away from prisoners and his recent role in demoting Republican representatives who broke with his bowing-to-Tim leadership by voting to override Plenty for a Chamber of Commerce transportation bill.

Rosario notes that Seifert

“is shrewd enough not to violate one of the cardinal rules of bad politics: Never let the facts get in the way of a bill that will pocket easy votes but actually make things worse.”

And he notes that Seifert’s latest attempt to make local police and sheriffs into immigration officers was likely not done with any input from the local police in our largest cities and certainly not with Saint Paul Chief John Harrington, whom he quotes as saying,'

It's a bad idea. We depend on people providing information and victims coming forward in cases that may involve terrorism, prostitution, human trafficking and domestic violence. We are dependent on people to help solve problems.

"We've heard from women who say they will rather take a beating before they call police if they think they or their kids will be deported. That's not what we are about. The community is better served and safer when people have the trust in us to tell us what is going on instead of hiding from us.''

His final suggestion that Chief Harrington might want to have somebody start his car from now on is probably hyperbole, but his article does generally seem to be right on the mark.

Let’s watch out for this guy. If Pawlenty doesn’t go to Washington and calls it quits after eight or twelve years this guy may want to become a resident of 1006 Summit Avenue. He’ll have his own security so having the Saint Paul PD tied up doing immigration duty won’t affect him.

Earlier posts: Observations on the Override [2/27/08]; Well, now we know how much time [3/3/08]

Well, now we know how much time

As I noted in a post on February 23:

Were gambling legal in this state [yeah, sure] it would be interesting if somebody made book on how long it will be before Pawlenty or one of his allies, hot-dogging politically to appeal to others' [and likely their own] bigotry uses this as justification for more cracking down on aliens [which also inherently means darker-skinned people who might be thought of as aliens], especially as to regards driver license labeling.

Well, now we know. House Minority leader Marty Seifert whose area the accident took place in, today introduced the idea of penalizing local taxpayers whose police agencies fail to check the legal status of people they contact.

I know that I carry neither birth certificate nor passport [which I have never even had] with me, so if I am ever in a traffic stop, I could be putting the taxpayers of our city in jeopardy. I could suggest that they just decide to never stop me, that it isn’t worth the hassle or risk to the city, but that is not the responsible approach.

What would be responsible is to learn that immigration problems are national problems, if they are problems at all, and to let the local authorities, police and others, work to keep our neighborhoods.

We all learn bigotry when we are young and most of us spend the rest of our lives fighting to unlearn it. To that we are continually and mutually educating each other at every age that people are people and that strangers are people also and that just they have different pigmentation or speak differently doesn’t mean that they are an exotic species.

This education would happen a lot easier were people like Seifert and Pawlenty willing to play less to the bigotry we all fight, willing to pass up the chance to hot dog it for a vote or two.

Observations on the Override

So, everybody is all excited one way or the other because the legislature finally overturned one of Governor Plenty’s vetos.

Much of the attention is being given to the new gasoline tax increase. Somehow a few more cents on a gallon seems minimal when compared with the ups and downs [mainly ups] in gasoline prices brought on by other factors, but we will all notice it a bit, I guess. What we sometimes forget is that all of this increase goes to roads and after seeing a lot of our roads, it is hard begrudge additional funding there, although we may feel that the choice of projects is sometimes dubious. Of course, it would seem that the fact that various others who don’t pay their full load of gasoline taxes [bicyclists, pedestrians, drivers of hybrid cars] will use some of these roads needs to be examined, but that would have continued to be a problem even if this bill had not become law.

The bill should have been defeated because it increases metro sales tax for that old ripoff, transit. But that doesn’t seem to be what motivated the governor or the GOP legislators.

There are 85 members of the DFL in the House, 48 of the GOP, and one without a caucus to belong to. A caucus that wants to be a majority caucus needs to be more inclusive and not take on its own members unless they do something beyond whatever the party’s pale is. With several veteran members about to give up what are not really safe seats, the GOP cannot really afford to lose many more if it wants to make the net gain of 20 seats in November.

What I really cannot understand is that Marty Seifert and the Republican House leadership seem determined to punish the six of their number who voted for the override. All six have suffered a loss of committee or leadership assignments. [For a comprehensive list, see this from Minnesota Monitor.]

The GOP leadership is not taking this action against somebody who voted to support organized labor, family farms, progressive taxation, or even abortion rights. They’re taking this action against somebody who supported something being advocated by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Yes, read that again. They supported the Chamber of Commerce, the people whou usually are the supreme arbitrating oracle of right and wrong for their party and they are in trouble for that.

Go figure.