As I wrote a week ago:
Apparently the only government department without a military force at its disposal is the military. So when a lone shooter opens up at an army base, Fort Shock'n'Awe has to call 911 and "shelter in place" until the county sheriff arrives. For your psycho gunman, a military base is basically a grade-school in uniform.
But apparently that's only true if you want to stand on a table yelling "Allahu Akbar!" and gunning down large numbers at people. By contrast, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, for some Third Grade student and his gran'ma visiting the Air Force Museum, the US military has all the firepower it needs to terrorize the kid and his sister. That's reassuring to know, isn't it? If the boy had put "Soldier of Allah" on his business card and been emailing Anwar al-Awlaki night after night, that would have been fine. But instead the kid made the mistake of playing the license-plate game in a museum parking lot:
A military police spokeswoman has conceded officers acted on "limited" information.
"Our security force, based on limited information, made a high-risk traffic stop and believed that this vehicle was stolen based on the information they received," said Cassie Barlow, 88th Airbase Wing Commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
"All we can do at this point is offer our apology to the Hills," she added. "And we've invited them to come out to the base and meet the security forces."
The Hill family seem to feel they've already met enough of them. Maybe it's time to move on and meet, say, the security forces at Yellowstone National Park.
There is a disturbing problem in American policing with the lack of judgment and any sense of proportion. If you're holding two women and two young children at gunpoint for no good reason, then - as when you're staging SWAT raids over loose-leaf tea, shooting seniors reaching for their canes, and killing nonagenarians in an old folks' home - you're doing it wrong. As Laura Rosen Cohen says:
America, I love you, but your police are out of control.
~Further to yesterday's story of the small "First Amendment Area" established by the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, the rancher's family now claim that the feds have begun killing his cattle:
"There's only one reason they have a backhoe and a dump truck up there and that is because they're cleaning up their mess from killing our animals," Ammon Bundy said.
The ranchers say this is calving season and mother cows are being separated from their babies.
"They haven't been able to feed their calves and that means the calves are starving to death," Ammon Bundy said.
The BLM has denied killing any cattle intentionally, only saying that there may be some cases where a cow would need to be euthanized.
I'm all for government agents improving their skills at euthanizing bovine herds. It means they'll be really good at it by the time they move on to us.
~As the Mann vs Steyn case rumbles nearer to a trial date circa mid-century, the big news of the day is a shake-up in Mann's lavishly white-shoed legal team. Longtime Mann lawyer Bernard S Grimm has decided to withdraw from the case. I eagerly await all the magazine pieces speculating on why Mann's attorney has has fired his client, as well as incisive commentary by ovine fornication specialist M J Murphy on what's really going on:
Lawyers don't like it when you make their job defending you more difficult by playing an asshole on the Internet.
Speaking of playing an asshole on the Internet, Dr Mann spent most of the day working on his ever expanding enemies list. Following his attacks on such notorious toxic right-wing #KochMachine #DenialMachine mainstays as Diane Rehm and Melissa Harris-Perry, he's now sniping at New York Times climate squish Andy Revkin because the paper had the impertinence to publish some "misleading screeds" on Mann's dreary new climate-change telly series in which he serves as personal climatologist to Jessica Alba.
Fortunately for the flailing Nobel fantasist, a new Mann-child at something called Non-Profit Quarterly has stepped up to the plate. In explaining why Mann is going to win his case against me and the rest of the gang, Rick Cohen writes:
If seven separate investigations proved Mann innocent of the charges that he had faked his research findings, one would think that Simberg and Steyn should have known, if only from osmosis, that to publish what they did might be seen as intentionally promoting a malicious falsehood about the Penn State professor.
Hmm. "Seven separate investigations", huh? Would Mr Cohen care to list them? In particular, would he like to point out the passages in these seven investigatory reports that "prove Mann innocent" of any charges? Or even state that he is the subject of the investigation?
These "seven separate investigations" are as mythical as Dr Mann's Nobel Prize. But, like everyone else in the Big Climate tree-ring circus, Little Ricky Cohen somehow thinks there were seven bodies that investigated and exonerated Michael Mann. "Osmosis" really isn't that reliable a way to pick up facts and stuff. Sometimes it helps actually to read the reports. So see here, here, here, here and here. If you're still feeling all osmotic about him being "proved innocent", it's something you're smoking.
~I'll be keeping my weekly radio date with Hugh Hewitt today, live coast to coast at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific.
