Bleeding heart conservatives...

There are many places where commonly held conservative/liberal dichotomies break down. One example is the way that Supreme Court Justices known as strict constructionsts such as Thomas and Scalia often side with their usual opponents on the left side of the bench when it comes to things like sentencing laws that restrict access to the Constitutional right to a trial by jury.

Yet another example is with regard to forfeiture laws. The Missoula Independent had a recent good article called Proving a Negative, in which a Missoula County case is discussed. The case, which centers on the confiscation of a Cadillac Escalade and its contents, sounds a little more like Miami than Montana, but certainly has all of the smell of a drug operation. The operative point, however, is what the defense attorney involved calls the "awkward position of rebutting county claims when the county hasn’t filed any criminal charges alleging drug-related wrongdoing."

Indeed, it doesn't sound as though there is any plan to pursue criminal charges against the individual involved, but the stuff is still forfeited unless the defendant can prove his innocence.

Casual conservatives have tended to ignore the growing role of civil forfeiture. Part of this is that such forfeitures fund law enforcement departments without resort to taxes, and part is probably because they are still stuck in old paradigms where the balance of power was perceived to have swung in favor of criminals.

When actually familiarized with the attentive arguments of conservative/libertarian organizations like the Cato Institute, which sees forfeiture laws as being increasingly abusive of traditional due-process rights and as threatening the centrality of property rights in a free society, many "law-and-order" conservatives begin to get much more uneasy. The issue has, in the past, united left and right -- and this should continue to be the case.

Strong proponents of the legitimacy of current forfeiture laws say that reforms have largely eliminated abuses and enshrined proper due process for innocent individuals whose property is seized in the course of these cases. This may be true, and it is certainly true that forfeiture laws have their theoretical common-law grounding in very old and well-tested precedents regarding things like smuggling.

It is still hard not to be uncomfortably aware of the many temptations that forfeited assets can conceivably have for law-enforcement agencies increasingly dependent on them as sources of departmental funding. There may not be a problem in Montana, but Montana Headlines is grateful for those defense attorneys who challenge questionable forfeitures. If problems are identified, conservative legislators and citizens need to engage those issues side by side with concerned liberals -- even if the underlying motivations of each may be somewhat different.

There oughta be a law...

Montana Headlines is today going to level a charge against the Billings Gazette -- perhaps the most serious one yet -- serious enough to make one contemplate introducing legislation (at the risk of running afoul of the 1st Amendment) addressing it:

The political cartoons the Gazette chooses to run are often not funny. Today's example

Failed jokes are the sort of dreadful thing that one really doesn't like to talk about, but although one's sense of humor can be seen as a privacy issue (raising Constitutional issues again), when it impacts others, it becomes a matter of valid public concern.

Montana Headlines admits to being a pretty humorless site. One cannot try to be what one is not. But the editorial staff at Montana Headlines does roar at good political humor, regardless of who is being skewered.

Good political humorists are able to get people almost anywhere on the political spectrum to laugh, regardless of who is the butt of the joke. Granted, as any exposure to political cartoons of the 19th century will demonstrate, political cartoons have a venerable history of being more preachy and vicious than hilarious.

Things have evolved for the better since then, however, and skilled humorists of every genre (particularly on television) have proven that political humor can actually be humorous.

The other effect that a political cartoon has on an editorial page is that it is often visually linked with a written editorial. Such is the case in today's Gazette, where the above cartoon is given as an inset for William Rusher's opinion piece about Iraq. William Rusher admittedly was in favor of the Iraq war when it was believed that WMD's were present there, and when they were not found, he supported the idea that in the wake of the war, the best thing America could do was to use our position in Iraq to change the political course of the Middle East. But this is not the place to analyze Rusher's views on Iraq.

The point is that in this particular column, Rusher is not advocating for the President's "surge," and states clearly the obvious, that Bush's plan in Iraq has failed, and that if this last gasp effort fails, that "Bush's legacy in foreign affairs will be one of abject failure." He is most emphatically not singing "Give War a Chance," in the words of the cartoon.

For the record, Montana Headlines has generally disagreed with Rusher's positions on the war from the beginning. But if political cartoons are going to be visually linked with an editorial, there should be a closer correlation between the content of what is written and the content of the cartoon.

And please, for the sake of the children if no-one else, give humor a chance.