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Many of my posts on J.A.I.L. (Amendment E) over the last year have focused on what I have no problem calling lies and misrepresentations. Yet I like it more when the backers, such as South Dakota J.A.I.L.er-in-Chief Bill Stegmeier, tell the truth. Why? Because it reveals the heart, purpose and intent of Amendment E.
One example is something the South Dakota J.A.I.L.ers have proudly put on their website – an interview with Stegmeier on “Live Fire,” a radio talk show hosted by the president of the Gun Owners of America. Stegmeier said he was using the interview to “drop a few bombshells on the opposition” and tell people the “unspoken realities of this amendment.” I’m not sure why Stegmeier thinks his pronouncements come as a surprise to opponents as they reinforce what we have been saying about Amendment E.
Stegmeier says Amendment E will be used to attack a procedure known as “summary judgment.” Most simply explained, such judgments are granted when the facts are undisputed and application of governing law to those facts requires a ruling in favor of one party or more without the need for a trial. I have not researched it but based on my 20 years of practice before administrative agencies and state and federal courts, I would wager a significant amount of money that many more such requests are denied than granted. In fact, I would call summary judgment motions an exception rather than the rule in a litigator’s practice.
What is most revealing is the basis Stegmeier gives for why we need Amendment E to attack something that has been used in the federal courts and every state for decades. He says its because cases are decided on the basis of whether one party is a friend of the judge. Of course, when the host asks Stegmeier to respond to criticisms that Amendment E can not point to any specific cases of judicial misconduct (like his example) in South Dakota, it is as the music to a commercial break starts playing and begins to drown out Stegmeier’s admission they can not. Instead, Stegmeier later points to a “poll” of 200 South Dakota prison inmates who all said they were treated “unfairly” by the judge or prosecutor.
Stegmeier also says Amendment E is intended to provide a method of jury nullification if a judge does not tell the jury they can ignore governing law. Likewise, he says the special grand jury has the power to overturn any law passed by the Legislature. That leads to a couple points.
First, J.A.I.L.ers claim the amendment is needed because the judiciary has become an unequal branch of government, contrary to the intent of the founders. Yet it appears their solution is to let 13 unelected individuals picked at random decide what laws they like and which they don’t and the public must abide by those decisions with no opportunity for recourse. I guess we no longer need the legislative and executive branches to participate in the law-making process and we can cast aside the initiative and referendum provisions of the state Constitution.
Second, four years ago an initiated measure was on the ballot that would have allowed jury nullification arguments and instructions. Voters rejected it by a margin of roughly 4 to 1. Like J.A.I.L., that proposal ended up on the ballot because a national, out-of-state group picked South Dakota due to “its low population and the small number of petition signatures necessary to get an initiative on the ballot.” If you doubt that part of the motivation behind Amendment E is to use a different package to sell voters something they already rejected, Amendment E directs voters to the national jury nullification group both in its campaign brochures and on its web site.
Finally, and perhaps most frightening, is Stegmeier’s view of how Amendment E would implement jury nullification. If a defendant contends a law shouldn’t apply to them but wasn’t allowed to argue or have the jury instructed on that contention, once the conviction is upheld the defendant can go to J.A.I.L.’s special grand jury. According to Stegmeier, not only could the special grand jury allow the defendant to sue the judge, they could give the defendant a new trial on the original charge! The standards by which this super jury answerable to no one will decide whether a law of general application applies to a particular individual? Whether the defendant is an “upstanding citizen” or has a “dubious” background.
The cause celebre for this argument was the host’s example of a Virginia school teacher with a revolver in her handbag in the classroom being arrested for violating a law against carrying a firearm during school hours in or on school property. (That is illegal under both federal law and Virginia law. South Dakota also bans possession of firearms on school premises.) Stegmeier said that, if convicted, the teacher would have little trouble getting a J.A.I.L. grand jury to give her a new trial if she were not allowed to claim the Second Amendment right to bear arms made such laws unconstitutional. In fact, Stegmeier said, “had there been a gun in every handbag of a teacher, we could have saved many, many lives.”
So, the solution to violence in schools is to put guns in them. And Amendment E’s view of a legal system is having 13 people selected at random, accountable to no one, deciding on a case-by-case basis what laws will be enforced and whether any particular law should apply to any particular defendant or litigant. What standards determine whether a person has a “dubious” background and is subject to all the laws or if they are a good person and, thus, can qualify to be exempt? Is it skin color? How about religion? Is it their job (or lack thereof)? What about their political affiliation or beliefs?
That’s why I love it when Stegmeier tells the truth about Amendment E. It demonstrates not only how radical it is, it shows that the amendment really is not about accountability, justice or democracy. Rather, that is what it seeks to destroy.
Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.
Confucius
Major junior leagues are playing, the pre-season NCAA Division I college poll is out and the National Hockey League (and my local favorite, the USHL) begin regular season play this week. That means hockey fans need to complete their tune-up for another year of hockey. How about a quick trip across the breadth of North America for a view of the state of hockey?
That’s what Bill Boyd provides in his All Roads Lead to Hockey. Boyd, a Canadian reporter who has covered the Olympic Games and word hockey championships, takes the reader from northern Canada to the Texas-Mexico border to show how the game has spread across the continent.
Boyd does not look at NHL teams except to the extent some of those interviewed played or coached in the NHL or aspire to do so. Instead, the odyssey he embarks upon is one devoted to amateur, junior, college and minor league hockey. He takes us to seven North American locations in this adventure, devoting a chapter to each. Two chapters in particular stand out — Boyd’s examination of hockey on the Opaskwayak Cree Nation reservation in Manitoba and in Laredo, Texas.
The former looks at the OCN Blizzard, a junior hockey team owned by the Indian nation. While six of the 20 team members at the time of Boyd’s visits are First Nations (the Canadian term for indigenous peoples) members, that is not a prerequisite. Rather, the Blizzard recruit from across Canada and even into the U.S. But Boyd doesn’t just look at hockey for hockey’s sake. His interviews explore how the team has helped improve race relations. He also touches on some of the problems often endemic to reservations. Here, it is the suicides of two native players. One in 2001 when the player failed to make the Blizzard roster. The other was Terence Tootoo, the first Inuit to play professional hockey, who committed suicide following a drunk driving arrest just two months after signing with a team in the minor league East Coast Hockey League.
The latter chapter takes us to the U.S.-Mexico border in mid-February to look at the Laredo Bucks of the Central Hockey League. Adding to the incongruity of a Texas hockey team is the fact that, with two exceptions, every member of the team is Canadian. The two exceptions? A Swede and an Israeli. But that doesn’t mean hockey is a rarity in Texas. In fact, Texas has more professional hockey teams (12) than any other U.S. state or Canadian province.
Laredo is a city of nearly 200,000 and is across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, which has a population of half a million. Games are occasionally broadcast on a Spanish language radio network and the Spanish play-by-play announcer estimates that at least 20 percent of those attending the home games cross the border from Mexico to do so. Likewise, the roadtrip Boyd goes on with the team is to Hisdalgo, Texas, another border town that is home to the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees.
Those are some of the standouts of Boyd’s work, as well as his chapters looking at college hockey both in the U.S. (Michigan State University) and Canada. But there are also disappointments.
One comes with the first chapter, which looks at a team from Barrie, Ontario, that won Canada’s Memorial Cup in 1951. There seems to be little focus to the chapter and one of its hooks – a hockey player whose nickname, Chevy, is part of the chapter’s title – isn’t really developed until more than halfway through the story.
That first chapter is also emblematic of two other problems with the work. One is that Boyd tends to drop and use the names of individuals, teams and towns which which readers, at least non-Canadians, are probably totally unfamiliar. A person could as much time digging through an atlas and a massive hockey reference book to know the significance, if any, of the names as they could reading the book.
The other is that too often the chapters tend to read like a simple conglomeration of the interviews Boyd did at each location. Rather than keeping the story focused on a particular point or theme, the interviews seem to diverge into unrelated areas with plenty of “war stories.” It is as if Boyd did not felt some obligation to print as as much of each interview as possible as recompense for the time the interviewee spent with him.
Still, the breadth of the book’s exploration of hockey in North America may interest fans of non-NHL hockey, allowing them to explore its popularity and growth throughout the continent.
[H]ockey’s like soccer, only on skates and with sticks and fighting.
A Laredo, Tex., hockey fan in
Bill Boyd, All Roads Lead to Hockey
Between trying to get caught up after being gone for several weeks (nearly 700 e-mails at work) and the cold/crud that has been dragging me down for a week now, I remain rather unfocused when it comes to blogs and newspapers. Moreover, even though I’ve managed to get a number of reviews drafted, these factors have combined to make me just a tad grumpy. Thus, a few cranky recent observations:
- A political note: What he said!
- I happened to go to a couple local stores with my wife the week of September 18. There was a Christmas tree up in one of the big box stores and a nearby national chain had various Xmas decorations out. Come on people; it’s three months away! Just shoot me now.
- As the Argus-Leader unveils it’s (dreadful) new format emphasizing local “news,” why is it that it prints the Minnesota high school volleyball poll but still can’t find room for the South Dakota poll?
- Likewise, why is it that the only question raised in the Argus about the simultaneous closure in one place or another of probably half or more of the main routes from Minnesota Avenue to Kiwanis Avenue (you know, the streets those of us on the west side of town must use to get to and from work) is a one-line comment from a resident to a reporter?
- In fact, why is it virtually impossible to drive from downtown to the west side of Sioux Falls without meeting a detour when, aside from the 12th Street project, there is no improvement in access.
- Although excited that local hockey starts next weekend, the week was topped off by discovering the reason I haven’t received my priority application form for Frozen Four tickets for a couple years is that the NCAA moved to an exclusively on-line application process and I didn’t get the letter telling people of that.
“[I]t takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.””Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?”
Bill Hicks, Relentless
Governments, projects and businesses tend to fear insider accounts. That’s because being on the inside means access to even the most damaging information. Yet what can be even more revealing is an insider account by someone who isn’t really an insider.
That may not have been what Rory Stewart set out to accomplish with The Prince of the Marshes, the U.S. edition of his book about his time with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq. Yet it can plainly be viewed as such. Stewart’s book not only reveals the problems created and faced by the CPA, it speaks volumes about the prospects of building a democracy in Iraq and the chances of its survival.
Following a stint in the infantry and study at Oxford, Stewart, a Scot, joined the British Foreign Office. He served in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then served in Montenegro following the Kosovo conflict. Stewart, though, is probably best known in the U.S. for his book The Places In Between, which details his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, not long after the Taliban had been overthrown. Given those experiences, Stewart volunteered to assist in Iraq. He served as a deputy governor in the provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar in southern Iraq from September 2003 until the transfer of sovereignty from the CPA to the Iraqis at the end of June 2004.
Stewart wasn’t someone who sat inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. Although Stewart takes us inside that area occasionally, most of his time was spent on the ground in the provinces, working daily with the Iraqis and dealing with both the mundane (roads, buildings, meetings) and not so mundane (hostage-taking, a siege of the CPA compound in Dhi Qar and elections). Stewart, who speaks some Farsi, is highly respectful of and toward the Iraqis and their culture. At the same time, he sees much of the problem in any democratization efforts stemming from the nation’s history.
Iraq was a nation held together by its central government. When Saddam was overthrown and the Baathists thrown out, there was a void the Iraqis had neither the resources nor the background to fill. While various tribal, ethnic and religious forces sought to assert authority, they brought with them a history of rivalries. Yet Stewart and the rest of the CPA quickly learned that even those rivalries and various alliances and coalitions would shift as circumstances changed — or even for no good reason as far as outsiders could tell. One example is the Prince of Marshes of the title, a leader of a tribe of Marsh Arabs, which predominate in one of the provinces. Although having a long history of being anti-Saddam, his allegiances and views toward Stewart and the CPA shifted with whomever seemed to offer the best chance of keeping him and his family in power and control. Not surprisingly, he and Stewart often disagreed. Thus, Stewart observes that when the Prince heard Stewart was being transferred to Dhi Qar, “he threw a party to celebrate my departure. He did not invite me.”
The Prince is simply one instance of Stewart and others facing an almost no-win situation. There was a tension between the irreconcilable positions of taking a hands-off approach to allow the Iraqis to create and grow democratic institutions and the need for CPA intervention, confrontation and control to make sure any efforts at democracy might have a chance to succeed. It was virtually impossible to find a middle ground that would please everyone and still accomplish the CPA’s goals.
[W]e needed to do more and we needed to do less Â? and we knew it. Iraq needed decent security, education, and health; the rule of law; a good economy; less corruption; the protection of human rights; robust civil society structures; and a democratic government. We came from societies where many of those things existed. But none of these platitudes, nor the “lessons learned” from post-war Germany and Japan, the Balkans and Afghanistan, and the history of the Middle East, told us much about how to achieve those things in modern Iraq. Still less did they tell us how much corruption and violence and incompetence we should tolerate before intervening. When to appease and when kill? In what circumstances were our governments prepared to kill Iraqis and in what circumstances were they prepared to have their own soldiers killed?
The difficulties posed by the conflict between political realism and political goals are reflected in Stewart largely using quotes from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses to introduce each chapter. Set aside the basic Shia-Sunni divide. How do you try govern or provide government for a province with 54 political parties, at least 20 tribes and a dozen leading religious figures, not to mention militias? Add to that a mutual distrust and suspicion existing not only between the CPA and the Iraqis but among the various Iraqi factions and you merely scratch the surface of the problem.
Still, Stewart believed it necessary for the provincial governments to restore security and order, not the CPA, whether locally or from Baghdad. That approach seems relatively straightforward. “We needed . . . to find councilors who were popular, legitimate, well-informed, honest, democratic, human-rights respecting, effective, friendly toward the Coalition, and powerful.” There was a small glitch. No one had all those qualities. Iraqi liberals interested in human rights lacked power. Tribal strongmen, such as the Prince, tended toward intolerance, violent solutions and trying to maintain control of their share of the black market. Popular groups, like the Sadrists and parties and militias with Iranian ties, were conservative, not overly concerned about minorities and opposed the CPA. Likewise, the CPA had little interest in the latter groups participating in, let alone running, local or provinciagovernmenttt.
Even when attempts were made to build local and regional governments fairly representing the various elements of society, they seemed doomed to failure. For example, in one joint meeting to discuss education and schools, the area mayors sat silently. Once the CPA presentation was over, “they stood, one by one, to demand weapons licenses and control of the local police.” Because most of their income came from the black market, the mayors “preferred guns to schools.”
In addition, graft and corruption not only appear to have been rampant, but the order of the day. And the CPA’s approach did not help. In a footnote early in the book, Stewart mentions one of the yet to be fully told stories of Iraq.
In May [2004], I was encouraged to spend ten million dollars in a month with almost no restrictions. Auditing systems were primitive and the money arrived, vacuum packed in million dollar bricks. We received so much money that it was impossible to spend it responsibly. I ran out of projects in Nasiriyah which could be completed in the time frame and had to return one and a half million dollars.
One wonders in how many other locations money was not only spent in the same fashion but there was little, if any, compunction to see to it that unspent funds were returned. And even though dollars flowed like water with few controls, the CPA still was criticized by various Iraqi factions. If one faction kidnapped the leader of another faction, it was the CPA’s fault for not providing sufficient security. If the CPA’s projects provided 500 or 3,000 jobs, it was the CPA’s fault there weren’t more jobs. If the electricity or water failed because of sabotage, that was the CPA’s fault. In fact, it often appeared that the only common denominator among all the factions was the desire to get rid of the American, British, Italian and others making up the CPA and security forces.
No, the events Stewart recounts do not bode well for the future of Iraq, at least as currently envisioned by the United States and other coalition members. But before Stewart’s views are rejected as those of someone who didn’t understand or support the mission, consider the following. Stewart completed his service in Iraq as deputy governor of Dhi Qar province. On September 21, that province became only the second in Iraq in which security is now under the control of Iraqi forces.
Still, Stewart himself might be among the first to recognize the possibility that such control may be a facade doomed to collapse. He notes in an afterword that the January 2005 elections trumpeted by the coalition produced exactly the kind of state in Maysan the coalition did not want to see Â? reactionary and intolerant toward women and religious minorities. It did, however, appear to have removed tribal gangsterism. Why? “The only two forces that remained outside the law were the Iranian-linked Badr militias and the Sadrists. But then they were now the elected government.”
We wanted to justify the invasion by doing some good; but we knew little about the people who surrounded us, or their culture.
Rory Stewart, The Prince of the Marshes
The hat tip for this goes to some who’s evidently become a regular reader — Bill Stegmeier. South Dakota’s J.A.I.L.er-in-chief was kind or taunting enough (I’m not sure which) to send me an e-mail captioned “Blog this Tim” about a full page ad the Amendment E folks are running on the back of the new Sioux Falls Shopping News.
Most of the page is an ad trumpeting the results of the Zogby poll and highlighting the corporate contributions to the No on E committee. But another ad on the page by Amendment E deals with its sponsorship of showings of a film called America: From Freedom to Fascism about 10 days before the election. This ad tells us “the struggle is just beginning!” It then talks about various contentions of the film but buries what Variety magazine calls its “cornerstone” — that the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was never properly ratified and, therefore, the federal income tax is not only illegal, it is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated by [the] government.” According to the New York Times, the film says the amendment was the vehicle by which “a shadowy cartel of bankers initiated their plans for world domination.” Even the Kansas City Star, which gave the film a generally favorable review, called it “a conspiracy-minded documentary from folks who think the federal income tax is a massive fraud and just one element in the move toward one world government and planetary totalitarianism.”
PP has posted related material about the film but I’ll just mention a few of the reviews the film has received. I realize, of course, they will be rejected by Amendment E hardcores because the media is part of the New World Order/Jewish banker conspiracy. Still, the film got a “Rotten” rating at Rotten Tomatoes.com. Here’s a few review comments:
Slant magazine: “a whacked-out piece of anti-American propaganda.”The Chicago Tribune: “a flailing Libertarian fever dream.”
The Austin Chronicle: “Russo (who also narrates the movie) undermines his work by freefalling into a tangled web of all-out conspiracy-mongering.”
The Onion AV Club: “The film somehow manages the formidable task of being far more paranoid and hysterical than even its screaming tabloid-headline title would suggest.”
Depending on my schedule, I may even take Stegmeier up on offer to attend one of the showings as his guest. Unlike many in the J.A.I.L. movement, I am not afraid to hear and consider contrary opinions.
Still, I think the ad and the sponsorship of the movie resolve any lingering questions about the motivations and beliefs of Stegmeier and the people behind Amendment E.
To know one thing, you must know the opposite just as much, else you don’t know that one thing.
Henry Moore
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