Let's start off by reviewing the key paragraph in our last episode:

On April 16 of 2008, Sheriff Bob Fletcher and Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner filed a hundred-page petition (here's Part 1; here's Part 2) with District Judge Joanne Smith, requesting that the judge revoke what they called Wilson's "conceal and carry permit", and documenting, in great detail, each and every one of the incidents above. In detail. The petition had been written and researched by David Rossman -- then a deputy assigned to Sheriff Fletcher's gun permit unit.

Which, combined with all the other strangenesses, was more than strange enough.

This morning it got stranger.  The following was posted in the comments -- go look for yourself.

I represent Ms. Wilson. You are wrong on many of your facts.

In addition, the incidents of 2004 and 2007, did not involve Michelle Rae Wilson. Those incidents involved another "Michelle Wilson". Ms. Wilson has no son named Terrance. She was not the perpetrator in those situations. I guess you should print at retraction.

All of this is wrong:

"In 2004, two neighbors accused Wilson and another son of pouring sugar in their car's gas tank; according to police records, one said that, "Michelle Wilson threatened to blow up her house and kill her. She taunted her to go outside." She owed Wilson $60, and couldn't pay. Vandalism is a crime; terroristic threats are a felony.

"But Wilson was never prosecuted -- SPPD Officer Kong just left a card at the house -- and it all went away.

"In 2007, Nakeshia Britton, a high school classmate of Wilson's son Terrence, got another restraining order, claiming that Wilson, her son and others had followed Britton's school bus home, after which Wilson and her son Terrence, "came up on the porch with broken beer bottles and a bat trying to hit me... and told Edna, my foster mom, to let me come out so they can kick my retarded ass." She said that they tried to force their way in."

Michelle has a clean record. Her friends and neighbors love her. You wrote a very unfair and factually false piece as it pertains to her.

Thanks,

Gary Wolf
Attorney for Michelle Rae Wilson

I'm always up for correcting any facts, of course, and I have no particular reason to doubt Mr. Wolf's claims of this morning that the 2004 and 2007 incidents were another Michelle Wilson.

In fact, I think he's right. Hence:

Addendum and digression:

Let me put that more strongly:  Oops.  I missed something.  After getting Mr. Wolf's email this morning, and reading his comment, as reprinted above, I went back and looked again at the voluminous documentation that Sheriff Fletcher filed with the court, and went over it with my friend, David Gross, who had reviewed both the piece and the revocation petition before.

While it's clear that the 1996 incident is Mr. Wolf's client, Michelle Rae Wilson, it's also clear, upon review, that the 2004 and 2007 incidents are, as he says, another Michelle Wilson, who lived at another address.  We missed that, when reviewing Sheriff Fletcher's petition.

End of Addendum.

But, let's be clear:  they're not my facts.  The source for the story wasn't my imagination -- I'm just a fiction writer, by trade, and I couldn't have made this stuff up; it's far too weird for fiction. 

The 1996 incidents, which Mr. Wolf doesn't dispute was his client (and, to be fair, he doesn't admit it, either) is from sections #6 and #7 in Sheriff Fletcher's and County Attorney Susan Gaertner's revocation petition, and their Exhibit K and and Exhibit L, both of which were submitted to the court in support of that petition.

Somebody accused of hounding an ex for four years (and that's what the accusation is in Exhibit K and L; I don't know if the accusers were lying) being issued a carry permit in Ramsey County?  Let's not be silly.  That wouldn't happen unless the applicant was connected -- say, by being the aunt of a Saint Paul cop.

But let's turn to the two incidents that Mr. Wolf does [addendum:  accurately] dispute. 

The 2004 incident, which Mr. Wolf does say was some other Michelle Wilson (and why would he lie?  I can't imagine a reason, and don't think he is) is also from Sheriff Fletcher's revocation petition, in which he claims that Respondent -- that's Mr. Wolf's client -- was named as a criminal suspect, and which Sheriff Fletcher supports with his Exhibit J.

The 2007 incident, which Mr. Wolf also says was some other Michele Wilson, is, yet again, from Sheriff Fletcher's revocation petition, in which Sheriff Fletcher claims that Respondent -- that's still Mr. Wolf's client -- was hit by a restraining order, and which he supports by his Exhibit I.

Let's assume -- he does seem credible to me; you decide for yourself -- that Mr. Wolf is right.  Why -- when trying to revoke a carry permit of a woman who was sitting in jail, accused of murder -- did Sheriff Fletcher throw accusations about another Michelle Wilson into the mix?

I wish I knew.  I think it's a fascinating question.

There are others.  Why wasn't the 1996 restraining order enough reason for Sheriff Fletcher to deny Michelle Rae Wilson's permit application in the first place?  He's certainly denied other applicants for less.  Why, when she was sitting in jail, did he apparently throw every accusation he could find up against the wall and see what would stick?  Wasn't the murder charge enough?  And why, after years in the Ramsey County Sheriffs Office gun unit, was David Rossman transferred to patrol after researching and writing that petition?

Apparently, one of the possibilities I raised in the last episode has not panned out:  it was apparently not a reward for the accuracy and thoroughness of the research he did in the revocation petition.  What did happen with the bumbling Deputy Rossman, and why?  Is it possible that, after deciding that Rossman is too incompetent to properly shuffle paper around, Fletcher put him in a squad car with a handgun and a shotgun to do things requiring far better and sharper judgment than he'd already demonstrated was lacking during his time in the gun permit unit?

I'd love to know the answers to all of these questions.

And there's more. Me, I think it would also have been news to many of us, back in 2008, after the murder, that the accused murderer was a Saint Paul PD dog cop's aunt, using supposedly, the gun that that same cop had given her.  Doesn't that sound like news to you?

Ah, if only there were some enterprise locally, that hired people to look into interesting questions about public figures and public officials, then reviewed and edited their reports, and printed them daily upon some inexpensive medium for public distribution.

Instead, what we've got is the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune.

Tinkerty Tonk posts a video of the always-amazing Wanda Sykes on the Imus affair.

Dear Mr. Goldman,

As you may know, even though Orenthal James "O. J." Simpson
has claimed he did not murder either his wife, Nicole Brown
Simpson, or your son, Ron Goldman, he has received a book deal
from ReganBooks for a reputed $3.5 million to explain how he might
have done it...if he had done it.  The book supposedly goes into
great detail about the murder of Nicole and your son Ron.

You may also have heard that we at Fox will be taping a 2-hour
interview with Mr. Simpson in which he will discuss the book and
the murder of Nicole and your son Ron.

We would like to invite you to be a secret special guest on the show.
Near the end of the interview, we will bring you out for a surprise
ambush confrontation with Mr. Simpson.

If you are interested in taking part in this---and we hope you are---
please contact me for arrangements.  We will pay your travel
expenses and provide accommodations in a luxury hotel.  Your
trip to the studio will be in a luxury stretch limousine with full
amenities.  Finally, we will give you the full VIP treatment at the
studio, including a special badge to bypass those tiresome security
checkpoints and their bothersome metal detectors.

This interview will air during sweeps weeks, so we hope your
presence will produce a heart-stopping surprise for O.J. and a
stunning conclusion for all our viewers.

Sincerely,

Todd McCraven
Special Interview Facilitator
The Fox Network

Sean Hannity has this to say about Democratic Congressbeing Nancy Pelosi:

"This is the moment to say that there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of 'em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn't become the speaker."

It would be cool if she took him up on that offer.

Wow. I have got to start reading the Weekly Standard more often. Heather Mac Donald has an editorial there titled "Information Please." It's a defense of the NSA collection of phone records, and it is both self-righteous and misinformed at the same time. I thought only us bloggers were supposed to post stuff like that.

I stumbled across this editorial thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein who takes exception to the to the pull-quote at the top of the article: "Only a paranoid solipsist could feel threatened by the calling analysis program."

Lindsay is philosopher, and she finds this amusing. Solipsism is a form of extreme skepticism based on the fact that all you know about the world is what your mind knows. The world as you know it is only known in your mind. So how do you know it's really out there? A solipsist would say there's no proof that it is, and might even say that there is no outside world at all. It's all in your mind.

The point is that if anyone really is a solipsist, he certainly wouldn't be paranoid that other people are spying on him because he doesn't believe there are other people. I guess Mac Donald knew solipsists think they are the center of the universe, and therefore figured it was just a synonym for selfish. [And, to be fair, that is a common usage.]

Fortunately for me, the stupidity doesn't end at the pull-quote. It permeates the piece. Let me serve up a few more choice morsels:

Since late 2001, Verizon, BellSouth, and ATT have connected nearly two trillion calls, according to the Washington Post. The companies gave NSA the incoming and outgoing numbers of those calls, stripped of all identifying information such as name or address.

That last sentence is pretty disingenuous. The information may be stripped of "identifying information such as name or address", but it's ridiculous to pretend the phone numbers aren't identifying information. The government can easily ask for name and address later. Or they can just Google them like I do.

I've emailed the Weekly Standard and asked Ms. Mac Donald to give me her home phone number. I'm sure she'll be sending that along any minute now.

No conversational content was included. The NSA then put its supercharged computers to work analyzing patterns among the four trillion numbers involved in the two trillion calls, to look for clusters that might suggest terrorist connections. Though the details are unknown, they might search for calls to known terrorists, or, more speculatively, try to elicit templates of terror calling behavior from the data.

No they won't "search for calls to known terrorists." If the NSA has the phone numbers of known terrorists, they can just just ask the phone companies for the terrorists' phone records. This is simply not how data mining works.

As a practical matter, no one's privacy is violated by such analysis. Memo to privacy nuts: The computer does not have a clue that you exist; it does not know what it is churning through; your phone number is meaningless to it.

Memo to authoritarian nuts: Us "privacy nuts" aren't worries about the computers, we're worried about the people who control the computers.

The press loves to stress the astounding volume of data that data mining can consume—the Washington Post's lead on May 12 warned that the administration had been "secretly...assembling gargantuan databases." But it is precisely the size of that data store that renders the image of individualized snooping so absurd.

No it doesn't. Mac Donald is speaking gibberish that sounds good to her, like some character on 24. Pulling individual data out of a database that size isn't hard, especially if it is pre-processed for easy querying.

It's not that big either. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, you'd need about 50 terabytes of storage to hold it all. To put that in perspective, a photo sharing site like smugmug has 100 terabytes of photos. (Heck, my wife and I combined have about 1.5 terabytes of disk storage in our home computers.) For a hardware cost of $1 million, the NSA could keep 10 copies churning out about 1000 individual queries a second.

As a constitutional matter, no one's privacy is violated by such automated analysis of business records.

As a constitutional matter, no one's privacy is violated by a middle-aged man in the park taking leering photographs of all the prepubescent boys. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be upset about it. Just because something is constitutional, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

After 9/11, a phone executive who didn't believe that the country was in danger of another catastrophic attack was seriously out of touch with reality. And the volume of data requested almost by definition protects the privacy of any individual customer.

9/11 was 4 1/2 years ago. It's absurd to believe that a condition of emergency still exists. To put it another way, there is always a chance of another catastrophic attack, so the rules we come up with should balance the risk of an attack against the cost of losing some of our freedom.

And as I explained before, the volume of data doesn't protect individual data at all. Heather Mac Donald should be able to figure that out for herself without being an Information Technology professional like me: All she has to do is get a phone bill every month. Clearly, the phone companies can identify individual behavior, so the NSA should have no trouble.

The Washington Post calls this numbers analysis the "most extensive...domestic surveillance [program] yet known involving ordinary citizens and residents." Bunk. The NSA's data mining program is not surveillance; no one is being listened to or observed.

Now she's playing word games. People make calls, and an uninvolved third party (the NSA) is finding out about them. If she doesn't want to call that surveillance, how about we call it spying?

Data mining looks for mathematical patterns in computerized information; it is not a real-time spying operation.

If it's not real-time, then there isn't any time pressure for the NSA to obtain the data. This is justification for more judicial oversight, not less.

The government didn't need to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a wiretap or pen register order (which governs the collection of phone numbers in real time from a single phone) because it is not listening to or recording any individual's calls. FISA is built around the notion of an individualized investigation of specific spies or terrorists; it is seriously outdated for the application of American computer know-how to ferret out terror plots before they happen and before the government has individual suspects in mind.

So spying on one person requires a court order, but spying on 280 million of them doesn't?

Also, actual pen registers haven't been used for many years because they only work on rotary dial phones (ask your parents, kids). When cops get an order to get numbers, they get them from the phone company, just like the NSA does. Why shouldn't the NSA have to follow the same rules?

But it may be too late to convey these truths. The time to explain how data mining protects privacy while providing a crucial tool against unknown mass-murderers was while the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program was under attack.

Well Ms. Mac Donald, why don't you take a crack at explaining how data mining could be used for this? Go ahead, enlighten us!

Cooperation between the private sector and intelligence agencies is crucial for uncovering terrorist plots. After 9/11, JetBlue Airways and Northwest Airlines offered privacy-protected passenger records to NASA and the Pentagon for research to see if data-mining could aid in identifying terrorist flight behavior. No passenger's privacy was violated, yet these two companies now face hundreds of billions of dollars in privacy lawsuits. The class action bar is undoubtedly gearing up for a similar assault on ATT, Verizon, and BellSouth, an abuse of tort law that will further discourage patriotic corporate behavior.

Every company named in the previous paragraph had a statutory or contractual obligation to protect customer privacy. They decided to break the law or break their promises or both, and now they will suffer the consequences in court. All of their troubles could have been avoided if the government had simply gotten a court order for the data. Nobody can be sued for properly obeying a court order.

It seems pretty clear that Heather Mac Donald has no real idea what data mining is or how it works. All she knows is that it takes a lot of data, that the Bush administration wants to do it, and that people she doesn't like are opposed to it. I'm not too familiar with the Weekly Standard, but I hope they usually demand more thought from their editorialists.

The Chicago Tribune says a bunch of folks in Barrington got sick because of carbon monoxide emissions from a defective Zamboni. I suspect that this is a story mostly because it's kind of fun to type the word Zamboni.

Radley Balko has an article about the killing of Cheryl Lynn Noel, who died from gunshot wounds during an early morning SWAT raid of the house where she lived. When the officers burst into her bedroom, she pointed a gun at them and they shot her down. Given that the raid only found small personal-use quantities of marijuana, it seems likely that Noel, a wife and mother of several teenage children, had no idea the home invaders were the police and was just trying to protect her family.

I'm just guessing. I could have that wrong. Cherly Lynn Noel's home could turn out to be a distribution center for half the drugs in Baltimore, for all I know. I guess we can expect the truth to come out in all the media coverage of the investigation, right? Well, maybe not.

All this happened last January. I remember reading about it, and you might too if you follow these kinds of stories like I do. But we didn't read very much about it, did we? Armed government agents storm a family home and kill the mother, and the news story runs just a few days? That makes it kind of hard to find out what's happening.

Balko has this to say:

...[T]he lack of follow-up coverage of the Noel shooting is disturbing for another reason: It's typical. With just a few exceptions in very high-profile cases, these shootings almost always trigger one or two pieces shortly after they happen, then the press falls silent. You'd think that when police storm a home in the early morning, then shoot and kill an occupant who is at best a nonviolent drug offender, and at worst completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever, it'd be worth some extended media attention. If we've reached the point where it isn't, how very sad for us.

I'm guessing that the media just doesn't see a hook for one of it's standard story outlines. Perhaps there's no racial angle, no way to blame a mayor or governor, no way to tie it to the war in Iraq. And for the same reasons, the story doesn't attract the professional outrage crowd—where's Al Sharpton when you need him? Where's the rap star accusing the police of hating people like Cheryl Noel?

I guess police killing someone in a low-level drug raid just isn't big news. As Balko says, that has unfortunate consequences:

I think a big part of the reason why the ubiquity of no-knock raids and the trend toward police militarization have gotten so out of hand is that the media has dropped the ball in its coverage of them. When the people in charge of protecting us start terrorizing, invading our homes, and killing us, that ought to be big news.

You know, if Samuel Alito is confirmed as the next Justice of the Supreme Court, he will be making decisions about freedom of speech, the rights of the accused, the scope of government powers under the commerce clause, the elements of procedural due process, eminent domain, the war on drugs, guns, commerce clause issues affecting online trade, and a whole bunch of other things. It's all pretty important stuff.

But none of that matters. All we'll hear about during the confirmation is Abortion.

It’s an emotional issue for a lot of people (which makes for "Good Television"), you can count on both sides to show some really bad behavior (which makes for even better television), and it doesn't take a lot of research to do a news report. So that’s all the media will talk about: Abortion, abortion, abortion.

And more abortion.

I'm not a real believer in blogger triumphalism: I don't believe bloggers are the new movers and shakers of the media world. It's true that some of the bloggers at the top of the ecosystem can influence the daily news cycle, but even then the story becomes big only when the mainstream media catches on.

Nevertheless, this from Eric's Grumbles Before the Grave seems about right (background: Daniel Lyons at Forbes recently published an article slamming bloggers):

Michael Malone, former Editor at Large of Forbes ASAP (aka The Boswell of Silicon Valley) has a good piece at ABC News today. He tackles where the blogosphere is, where it's going and how bad Forbes is at tech predictions. It's well worth reading, especially for this excerpt.

There is already a hilarious parody of Lyons' piece circling the blogosphere in which an 18th-century essayist complains that pervasive printing presses have led to the rise of pamphleteers, whose scurrilous antics have prevented King George III from raising taxes to finance his "benevolent aims" for the colonies.

That's pretty accurate, actually. To its eternal credit, Forbes really does want everybody to become wealthy. But until they do, the little people need to know their place.

Yes, it is pretty accurate. We bloggers are the modern pamphleteer, taking on the entrenched political interests and concentrated powers of today. And yes, Forbes and his ilk really do think that we need to know our place.

Eric has more to say about it in two earlier posts of his, Bloggers: The New Pamphleteers and then More on Bloggers and Pamphleteers.

When I read Kathleen Parker's Chicago Tribune article about free speach, I had some doubts that she had ever heard any of Kanye West's music. Michael M. Davis at Garfield Park would seem to agree.

Here's how you write a newspaper column. Find a topic that engages you. Then bang your head against a computer screen until what you've written no longer makes you want to hurl.

My words are important to me. I struggle with them, obsess over them. Show me something I wrote and I can tell you stories of how it came to be, why this adjective here or that colon there.

Actually, I don't work that hard. That's not even me. The previous two paragraphs have been plagiarized whole from a column by Leonard Pitts. The original column at the Miami Herald has an annoying registration page, but the Detroit Free Press has a copy.

Apparently, some loser at the Daily Tribune News in Cartersville, Georgia has been plagiarizing Pitts' articles for a while now, including one about Pitt's mother dying of cancer. Rather than handling it quietly, Pitts wrote a freakin' column about it. Ouch.

The guy was fired almost immediately.

I work for myself and can't be fired. So if I can just get Leonard Pitts to denounce me in his column, I should get a lot of traffic.

Oh, and I'm not saying Glenn Reynolds ever put a puppy in a blender, I'm just saying he hasn't established to my satisfaction the he hasn't.

Some of the folks in New Zealand aren't happy with how Britain is complying (or not) with the Treaty of Waitangi which guarantees...well, I have no idea. What got my attention is one woman's rather unusual method of protesting Prince Charles' visit this week. As the MSNBC story headlines it, "Prince Charles faces bare-breasted protest." Ths link is worth checking out if only for the article's remarkable subtitle. In case MSNBC changes it, I'll repeat it here:

Topless woman, others oppose sovereignty over New Zealand

The Onion couldn't have said it better.

If I ran a big-time news service, one of my policies would be to only run items as news that are really news. Here's an example:

Why is it news when Madelyne Gorman Toogood allegedly beats her daughter? She's the Indiana woman who got caught on a parking lot video tape apparently punching her daughter in the backseat of her car. Child abuse is obviously a bad thing, but as these cases go, this one looks pretty routine. The violence was not extreme or unusual, just a mother beating on her kid. Lots of people beat their children, and lots of them get caught, so that's not unusual either. This isn't even a case of a common event happening to famous people: Neither Ms. Toogood nor her daughter Martha were in the public eye before this incident.

The story of Madelyne Toogood is news only because it was caught on video and played on network television. Thus, we've reached the sad situation where a subject is news only because it is news.