Wait a minute, this was in Iowa? Hold the phone, that’s entirely different! Iowa, that seething hotbed of rabid radicalism? The “Flat Berkeley”? Where Molotov coctails must, by law, be 40% ethanol? Home base of the insidious, dark conspiracys of Comrade Spavined (whose relentless, inflammatory Trotskyist rhetoric gives me the willies)! Well, that’s very different! If one is seeking to root out a radical terrorist movement, you must go to the source of the infection. Look at a picture of Orville Redenbacher and tell me that isn’t the very portrait of extremism gone berserk!
As Che Guevera remarked: “Los Iowans! Ah, Dios mio, estan todamente loco!”
According to this morning’s Des Moines Register we have had some new developments in the Great Drake University Security Scare.
First, the US Atty has asked the grand jury to quash the subpoenas issued to the four individual people who had been subpoenaed last week.
Second, the US Dist Court (apparently in St Paul where the grand jury is meeting) issued an order withdrawing a previously entered “secret order” which prohibited Drake University and its employees from talking about the subpoena directed to the university. Apparently we did not know about this order because it was a secret. It looks as if the subpoena directed to the university for information on the conference and on the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild still stands.
Third, the paper published a photo of what purports to be a Des Moines police officer filming the Drake conference from the window of a hotel / boarding house adjacent to the university campus.
Fourth, the paper makes reference to the arrest of 12 people at the National Guard headquarters building but says nothing about anybody being arrested at Camp Dodge. Since the lobby and grounds of the NG building are public access and the place is owned by the state it looks as if any arrests were for something like disturbing the peace or trespass for refusing to leave the premises after being directed by the person in lawful control to do so.
This thing gets stranger and stranger. What bugs me, however, is the idea of ex parte secret gag orders. You can’t help but wonder if the court that entered that was sitting in a court room with gold stars painted on the ceiling.
Double secret probation? Life imitates art.
I am not per se opposed to ex parte gag orders, but the threshold for their issuance should be extraordinarily high.
I would note, as I said before, that the remedy for an improper subpoena is to quash the subpoena.
- Rick