I had a weird dream last night

I was in the empty lobby of a police precinct, unwittingly there just to rest a moment, to calm my anxiety and collect my thoughts.

There was a faint sound of conversation in an adjacent office. "He was a white, middle-aged man on a bicycle..." were the first words I heard plainly. And it was a familiar female voice.

It's true. Minutes earlier it had been me that was flying my bike down a crowded city street, possibly causing alarm and panic, whizzing past a lady that looked a lot like a blonde TV-cop -- who, in a predictably commanding tone, screamed out, "Stop and get back here right now!"

She might not have been a cop, I thought. And even if she was who knows who she was screaming at? It felt like I was evading a cop.

Things are moving fast. Time to get out of the area. Time to assess the situation, I thought, turning a corner, ditching the bike, and stepping into the first public building I came to.

Alarmed myself now, realizing I was the subject of this field report to the authorities, I swiftly ducked away through a corridor, where I stumbled on a somewhat interesting shipping tube laying atop a trash bin. Inexplicably I swept it up to have a closer examination while on my brisk walk. But the sound of a conversation between Patricia Arquette, the actual actress, and two men I presume were a pair of detectives, caught me off guard. "That guy," Patricia said assuredly. I slowly looked up as I paused.

They gave me a silent stare that felt like minutes. I returned a look, vowing to myself not to say a word while they analyzed me. As I began to realize just how virtuous silence can be, I confidently and calmly turned and continued down the corridor. No one stopped me. I'd managed to flee the scene without incident or objection.

"Clever," I heard one of the men say as I stepped out of sight. "The only evidence is sealed by federal postal law." They must have thought I'd hidden something in the shipping tube I merely thought looked cool ... as if I'd have had the wherewithal to contemplate such a calculated maneuver. A parcel is safe harbor from search & seizure, I imagined. That, along with my instinctive silence, saved the day.

A palpable sense of relief washed over me as I climbed back onto my bike. I can only imagine the conversation that transpired amongst the trio after I'd left. Lacking a real crime, I bet the detectives dismissed Ms. Arquette with polite platitudes.

It seemed real.

Rep. Steve King and the SCOTUS gay marriage ruling

So Friday SCOTUS nixed states' arbitrary restrictions on marriage, restoring civil rights owed to couples of like gender. And before day's end, the always sensational Rep. Steve King (R-Ia.) predictably argued that decision is oustside the court's purview, calling it "judicial fiat."

Apparently they're members of the Grand Old Party, conservatives & libertarians, except when those principles conflict with a certain world view.

You may remember '09 when the King scare machine reacted to Iowa's top-court ruling striking down this state's restriction on gay marriage, fearing that decision "turns immediately Iowa into a Mecca for same-sex marriage." He warned of "weekend [travel] packages being planned right now." And the fear language didn't stop there. "We'll be the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage for America if the legislature doesn't act now," King asserted. At the time he called on the Iowa Assembly and then-Governor Chet Culver (D-Ia.) to move quickly to require residency for marriage ... "right now, before the planes start landing in Des Moines," as if they might be loaded with WMD.

Video: Rep. Steve King with radio host Jan Mickelson, April, 2009



Let's be clear. A fundamental duty of the high court is to hold states' authority in check, protecting individuals' Constitutional protections from Gestapo-style government imposition where ever necessary.

Instead King, applying a bizarre sort of acrobatics to language and logic that even a 5-year-old can see through, today claims this country "cannot tolerate a Supreme Court that would impose their will on the rest of this country."

Striking down same-sex marriage bans in no way creates a restrictive imposition on others. Efforts by Congressman King, right-wing religious lobbyists like Bob Vander Plaats and pundits like Jan Mickelson to paint certain kinds of marriages as "weakening the institution" are absurd, and their attempts to moore their false logic in mythology can't mask their scalding bigotry. They can only point to religious symbolism in order to criticize Friday's ruling. Must we remind him there are no references to "holy matrimony" in the Constitution?

America is not a compendium of special clubs who get to use government as a tool to impose their wants on the "those people" whose behavior they despise. Being an American means a lot of different things to different people, but it can never mean you have a right not to be offended.

Consensual and non-consensual police encounters

We've covered the levels of police encounters before and I don't like to spend too much time on covered ground, but I discovered a very nicely made instructional video with an excellent example of a non-consensual encounter without justification that quickly escalated to an arrest without any cause.