Laissez-faire

“Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with cries of distress, the soil soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes. Where is the heart that can contemplate such a scene without shivering with horror?”

– New England Courant newspaper (1801), on the election of Thomas Jefferson

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Such vigilantism (see story below) is an unfortunate side effect of a city (with a bleeding-heart liberal mayor, council and judicial system) that continues to coddle gangs and other criminal elements. Protecting the public from lawlessness and anarchy is supposed to be the #1 reason that government was created 10,000 years ago. Everything else is so far down the list that it’s off the charts.

Cutting the heart and guts out of gangs should be the life’s mission of the mayor in St. Paul. Double the size of the police force if necessary. Appoint and support judges who pity victims instead of criminals. All necessary resources should be thrown in the mix (even if it means dramatically cutting back on “free stuff” that you want to give to your favored constituencies to buy votes).

The creation of the RICO act all but destroyed the mafia on the east coast. Why the hell can’t a gaggle of fed, state or local lawyers come up with a “RICO” act targeted at gangs? Do we have a shortage of lawyers in this country ???? Are they all too “busy” doing good deeds more important than this ????

Methinks you’re going to see more and more and more of this. If the powers that be aren’t going to take gang violence seriously then it’s hard to condemn someone who was so fed up and frightened that he took the law in his own hands. Now he’s facing a second-degree murder rap. I’ll bet that no resources will be spared to put this “criminal” away. That will sure keep our streets safer !! In the meantime, the gang members all scattered and presumably headed back to their 9-5 at Wal Mart.

P.S. Good thing that it was an Asian killing an Asian. That at least keeps the racist nonsense out of the picture that the bleeding hearts would be screaming about. It’s just too bad that no one is screaming about the real issue here.

– Smitty, 10-30-07

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Reference: http://www.twincities.com/newsletter-morning/ci_7316499

Gang gathers; father shoots

Man charged in teen’s death told police his son, 19, was threatened

BY EMILY GURNON
Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated: 10/30/2007 12:04:02 AM CDT

He had been shot by gang members before. So when a group of Bloods threatened his son in a dispute over a girl, Nai Vang grabbed the rifle he used for hunting squirrels and pulled the trigger.

Police said that’s what Vang told them after a Friday night incident in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood left one teen dead and one injured.

Vang, 37, of St. Paul, was charged Monday by the Ramsey County attorney’s office with killing 18-year-old Chia Neng Yang of Brooklyn Park, who was found dead in a nearby alley after the shooting.

The medical examiner provisionally determined that Yang died of a gunshot wound to the chest, complicated by injuries “from pedestrian vs. motor vehicle,” according to police. Yang had a severe head injury after he was run over by a car shortly after being shot. Investigators were initially unsure what had killed him.

Vang was at home with his children and some friends about 7 p.m. Friday when a group of Bloods drove up to his house at 837 E. Jessamine Ave., according to the complaint.

The complaint describes events this way:

An argument erupted between the Bloods and Vang’s son, who is dating an ex-girlfriend of a Bloods gang member. The son, Gary Vang, 19, and his friends are Asian Crips members, one witness told police.

Investigators later searched the home on a warrant and found photos of Asian men and women flashing gang signs, as well as gang wear and a notebook with “crips vs. bloods” written on the back.

Confronted by the other gang, Gary Vang said, “If they want to fight, let’s fight,” and he, two brothers and friends started to gather up sticks and knives.

Nai Vang then walked out of the house and told the other group of about 20 to leave, but they approached his three boys, he told police. When a fight seemed imminent, he went into the house and got his gun.

Witnesses saw him raise the rifle to his shoulder shoot into the crowd. The Bloods began to scatter. Two, including Yang, were hit. A friend saw Yang lying in the alley and yelled at him to get up, but he didn’t move.

Seconds later, a car roared through the alley, running over Yang, witnesses said.

A 15-year-old boy was treated at Regions Hospital for gunshot wounds to his arms.

Nai Vang told police that gang members shot him when he lived in the 600 block of Wells Street a few months ago. He believed the gang members were “coming back to finish him off,” the complaint said. On Friday, he said, he first shot in the air, then lowered his gun but did not shoot directly into the other group. He thought he was the only person to shoot. After the incident, he put his gun back in the bedroom.

Police that evening ordered at least a dozen people out of the house after the shooting, including several young children.
Nai Vang was charged with second-degree murder and two counts of assault.

St. Paul police arrested Gary Vang on suspicion of homicide Saturday. The investigation into the younger Vang continues, said officer Pete Crum, a police spokesman.

Mara H. Gottfried contributed to this story. Emily Gurnon can be reached at egurnon@pioneer press.com or 651-228-5522.

“I do not believe people are born evil. You have to work at it. You have to make many bad choices, turning again and again toward the dark until finally, you can see nothing and no one beyond yourself.”

– Mark Hare, Rochester (NY) Democrat & Chronicle

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Reference: http://news.aol.com/story/ar/_a/america-tortures-prisoners-carter-says/20071010165209990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
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Dear Former President Carter: You continue to prove over and over what a despicable person you are. Of all ex-Presidents in the 20th Century, you are the least qualified to criticize the performance of others.

Obviously, you must think the electorate are a bunch of idiots with a short memory ……… too short to recall what an absolute disaster your tenure as President was.

Well I remember …..

- I remember the nice “hat trick” your economic incompetence gave us: Double digit-inflation, double-digit unemployment, AND double-digit interest rates. A hell of an accomplishment. You must be so %$#@ proud.

- I remember being ecstatic that I was able to secure a “low” 13% home mortgage interest rate for my first home in 1980.

- I remember Islamic-fascism being born under your incompetent watch. The savages were emboldened once they knew that the US had a complete hamster for a President, so they kept our Iran Embassy staff hostages for 444 days knowing that they had nothing to fear from you. To this day, countless civilian and military lives (US and foreign) have been lost directly or indirectly due to your absolute inability to deal with evil, which has immeasurably strengthened these savages to this day.

- I remember you giving America-hating Michael Moore an honored seat next to you at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Why don’t you just save some time and spit on the US flag ??

I still have nightmares imaging you as our President on 9/11. That would have been a disaster beyond the pale. Your “endorsement” of John Edwards was the kiss of death for his campaign. Hillary and Barock fared far better ………… they were only endorsed by Castro.

Based on the nonsense you’ve spouted over the years, I’m formulated the “Jimmy Carter 180 Rule”: Whenever you say the US should do something, in reality we should do the exact opposite as rapidly as possible if we truly love our country.

Please keep your filthy, slimy, misguided, anti-semitic, American-hating terrorist-enabling, dictator-loving “opinions” away from those of us who actually care about this country and where it’s headed.

– Smitty, 10-14-07

“Counter-terrorism experts say that Osama bin Laden may be hiding secret messages on pornographic websites. You know what that means, Clinton could find this guy before Bush.”

—Jay Leno

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………. for continuing to do triple-backslips in your efforts to enable terrorism. It’s bad enough that we have to fight Islamofascists; with you as their defacto ally it’s far worse ………

– Smitty, 10-7-07

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Source: http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/FISA_act/2007/10/05/38477.html?s=al&promo_code=3AF5-1

Do We Want Another 9/11?

Friday, October 5, 2007 11:29 AM
By: Ronald Kessler

In their efforts to demonize the American intelligence community, Democrats and the media are playing with our safety.

The latest example is the way these critics are minimizing and distorting warnings from Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence, about how defenseless America would become if warrants were required to intercept terrorists’ calls and e-mails even when those communications are in foreign countries.

The issue should not be controversial. Going back to the founding of the National Security Agency in 1952, the government could intercept calls and e-mails of targets situated in foreign countries without a warrant. But because most such communications now pass through U.S. switching systems in fiber optic cables, a Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA) court judge ruled on May 31 that intercepting such communications requires a court order.

Obtaining a FISA court order requires an average of 200 man hours of preparation. Often, people who speak Arabic, Farsi, or Urdu have to be pulled off tracking leads to possible plots to help prepare the applications. Moreover, by the time an order is obtained for a new targeted phone number, the call is finished.

Because of the ruling, tens of thousands of calls and e-mails were not being examined. Any one of them could have contained clues to an al-Qaida plot to detonate nuclear devices in Manhattan and Washington. As FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has told me, these are al-Qaida’s twin goals.

In August, Congress — over the objections of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi — voted to continue to allow intercepts of calls based in foreign countries without the need for a warrant. But already, Pelosi and other Democrats have vowed to gut that law, called the Protect America Act, before it expires on Feb. 5.

To illustrate the need for an extension of the revision, Director of National Intelligence McConnell recently cited a delay “in the neighborhood of 12 hours” to obtain a warrant under the emergency provision of FISA. The warrant was to listen to calls made last May by insurgents who captured American soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. The bodies of some of those captured have since been found; the other soldiers are presumed dead.

That example should have been enough to put the issue to rest. What could be more absurd than having to obtain a warrant to listen to conversations of foreign insurgents? But Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, accused McConnell of trying to “politicize the debate” over electronic surveillance by citing the soldiers’ case.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, blamed government officials, not the law. Reyes claimed an emergency request under FISA should take “only a few minutes” and “one call.”

When McConnell subsequently released a time line showing that the delay in obtaining a warrant was nine and a half hours, the press pounced. The Washington Post ran a story focusing on the difference between McConnell’s initial rough estimate of the delay to obtain an emergency warrant and the more precise time line he later released.

“Iraq Wiretap Delay Not Quite As Presented,” the headline over the story said. “Lag Is Attributed to Internal Disputes and Time to Reach Gonzales, Not FISA Constraints.”

The story claimed that the delay of nine and a half hours was caused “primarily by legal wrangling between the Justice Department and intelligence officials over whether authorities had probable cause to begin the surveillance.”

The delay included “nearly two hours” spent trying to reach then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was speaking to U.S. attorneys in Texas, to obtain authorization of the emergency application, the story said.

In what has become standard practice in the mainstream media, the Post buried the Justice Department’s response that the case “presented novel and complex issues that we had to resolve” in the 11th paragraph of the story.

In fact, based on the original intent of FISA, since the communications were in a foreign country, no warrant should have been required in the first place. The point of revising FISA was to make that clear so that such calls could be intercepted instantly. But since the revision had not been passed last May and the communications happened to be routed through the U.S., authorities were obliged to carefully line up the facts and examine all the legalities before applying for an emergency authorization.

If, as Reyes claimed, that process normally took only a few minutes and one phone call, it would be a sham exercise. Moreover, the time required to obtain authorization from officials like Gonzales under emergency conditions only underscores why tolerating such onerous legal procedures when Americans’ rights are not at stake is foolhardy.

Rep. Holt’s claim that McConnell was politicizing the issue by presenting a case history has become a standard tactic of many Democrats. If intelligence officials like Mike McConnell or military officers like Gen. David Petraeus cite evidence to back up their case, they are accused of either being pawns of the White House or of using scare tactics.

The Washington Post’s story illustrates how the media undermine the war on terror by obscuring the truth. In highlighting a difference of two and a half hours between McConnell’s rough estimate of the delay compared with the actual duration of the delay, the paper sought to undermine McConnell’s credibility.

The problem was not “legal wrangling,” the term the Post chose to apply to legal deliberations. The problem was that FISA had not kept up with technological changes and needed to be revised to make it conform to its original intent.

If al-Qaida succeeds at its goals, it could literally wipe out millions of Americans and institute a nuclear winter. Yet between the Democrats’ efforts to handcuff those who are trying to protect us and the mainstream media’s efforts to malign those officials and distort the truth about the issues we face, we as Americans are at the mercy of people bent on committing suicide.

Osama bin Laden, known to follow the media closely, has to be laughing.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of NewsMax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail