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“These defendants are guilty,” federal prosecutor Kendall Day told jurors in Montgomery, Ala., Wednesday morning. “It’s time for you to tell these defendants that the government in Alabama is not for sale.”

Federal prosecutors have been on a righteous crusade in Alabama for the last year or so. They arrested about a dozen people who were either politicians or involved in the gambling industry in the state and charged them with bribery. It was all about good government and keeping crooks out of the public’s business, they said. Unfortunately, the story is a lot more complicated than prosecutors want us to believe.

What’s the difference between a campaign contribution and a bribe? What’s the difference between giving someone money to get elected in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is illegal — and delivering a block of votes to a candidate in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is legal? If a union leader says, “If you support this law that we want, my 10,000 members will vote for you,” why is that legal — if it’s illegal to say, “If you support this law that we want, I will give your campaign a million dollars to help you get elected”?

The guy in the picture above is Milton McGregor. He’s been the leading figure in the gambling industry in Alabama for decades. He’s owned greyhound racing tracks and huge bingo operations. Because most gambling is illegal in Alabama — for reasons that have never been clear to me — he has had to fight hard for the right to be left alone by the government to run his businesses.

I don’t mean to paint him as a saint or a do-gooder. He’s not. He’s a hard-nosed businessman who’s willing to cut corners and bend the rules to get what he wants. He’s been known to make illegal cash contributions to candidates, but that’s never been legally proven. Two years ago, the state government was trying hard to shut down his bingo operations. The governor at the time was making it a big deal. He had a task force that he was using to raid many of the operations and claim they were illegal. (For complicated reasons that I won’t bore you with, the bingo operations were operating in a gray area of the law. The governor was interpreting the law one way. The operators interpreted it another way.)

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More random thoughts that don’t belong anywhere else…

I’ve noticed something interesting about the psychology of most people who consider themselves libertarians. It’s my observation that most libertarians are opposed to rules coming from the state, but they’re also temperamentally inclined to have strong views about “the right way to do things” on a wide range of subjects. I don’t generally see them wanting to force others to comply with their ways, but it seems as though they’re more drawn to systematic rules than the average person is.

Two questions: 1) Am I accurate in my observation? 2) If so, why might there be this statistical correlation between desiring legal freedom and a tendency toward believing in One True Way to do things (not just politically)? I asked these questions of friends on Facebook the other day and everybody generally agreed it was true. The “why” question generated some interesting discussion. Do you guys have any thoughts about it?

I suspect that the same internal need for logical consistency which drives us to adopt a very unpopular political position (or some variation of it) also drives us to need logical consistency in the world around us. That doesn’t exist, of course, and we can sometimes end up frustrated when people can’t see what’s so obvious to us. What do you think?

I finally have official word about the lump I had removed from my breast last month. It was intracystic papillary carcinoma, which is so rare that there’s not much known about it. The good news is that it’s not very aggressive and is very unlikely to recur.

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When I first heard about the shooting at a high school in Ohio Monday morning, my mind immediately went back to the shootings at Columbine High School near Denver almost 13 years ago. I wonder if this incident will ignite the same hysterical reaction as the one that followed the Columbine tragedy.

In the shooting at Chardon High School, just outside of Cleveland, a lone student apparently came to the school cafeteria Monday morning and fired four or five shots. The student was someone who other students described as an outcast, someone who might have been the victim of bullying.

Roughly 1,200 students and their parents spent the rest of the day being grateful they weren’t directly affected by the shooting — such as the student and her father above — but a few families weren’t so fortunate. Two students died and three others are wounded.

After the Columbine shooting in 1999, there was a renewed push to make guns harder to own. There was also a huge and very expensive push to install metal detectors and upgrade security at schools all over the country. Schools that had been relatively open to their communities because more like fortresses in some cases. Why? Because every administrator was scared that his school system might one day be the site of another random fluke of violence — so every one of them went overboard to show parents that everything was being done to protect their children.

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