By Chris Reed

A former official with a state law-enforcement agency sent me a contrarian take on the week’s events in Massachusetts:

“At the risk of spoiling the high fives on the Boston bombing incident, has anybody asked how this guy was not on the FBI’s radar 5 minutes after the terrorist attack.  He openly posted radical ideas and linked to Chechen terrorist videos on the internet and had just traveled back to the epicenter of terrorism, Chechnya and Dagestan?????   

“We spend billions upon billions to gather intel, surveil the internet and identify potential threats.   JTTFs and terror centers and intel fusion hubs are to track and hopefully prevent these guys from acting.  At least he should have been on a short list of candidates within 12 hours of the bombing.  

“Yet the FBI was reduced to posting blurry video photos like any 7-11 robbery 5 days after the attack.  really, only the amateur nature of the attackers led to their arrests…not brilliant police work.  Didn’t get any value from anti-terror money spent.  After 5 days it would seem like someone might have looked at the Chechens photographs, which the FBI presumably had, and a light bulb would have lit up. They lived in the neighborhood!  The leader was a wife-beater!

“Then there is the never-ending problem of allowing immigrants from terror-spawning regions to come here.  Chechens?   As if there aren’t a couple billion non-muslim non-american hating people in the world who wouldn’t give their left arm to come here.  Chechens?   Seems like we have already experienced this with Somali ‘refugees’ who return to Jihad not to mention the 9-11 hijackers.  It’s a big world, how about we consider our own interests in immigration and visitation?  Political correctness run amok.”

We’ll see if more of this contrary thinking emerges after the high-fives and back-slapping come to an end.

By John Seiler

San Francisco has a reputation as a “tolerant” city, the capital of the 1967 Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury and all that. Whatever it was in psychedelic Sixties, today it’s one of the most intolerant cities around. For example, on June 6, San Fran voted a whopping 74 percent for Proposition 29, the buck-a-pack cigarette tax. The rest of the state opposed it, 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent.

What have San Franciscans got against tobacco smokers, who tend to be poor people? No doubt it comes from city’s heritage of its major Anglo settlement by intolerant New England Puritans. They always want to tell everybody else what to do.

By contrast, Orange County was settled by more tolerant Okies and Mexicans. Not surprisingly, O.C. voted 59 percent to 41 percent against Prop. 29 — that is, in favor of tolerance toward smokers.

The latest display of San Francisco intolerance concerns Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy saying he wasn’t keen on same-sex “marriage.” He said it violates his religious beliefs.

It’s important to note that he didn’t say he was firing homosexuals from his company. And he didn’t come out in favor of bringing back anti-sodomy laws. He just expressed his religious opinion.

In response, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee attack-tweeted, “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone.” A second tweet: “Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”

As Anthony Gregory noted at the Independent Institute site:

“For his stance on this issue, which is not all that different from Obama’s stance just a year ago, many in the gay rights movement decided to boycott his fast food chain. Whatever one thinks of this, it is well within the rights of people to vote with their dollars. The Executive Director of Log Cabin Republicans argues that the boycott is poor strategy, however, because ‘turning a chicken sandwich into Public Gay Enemy Number One makes LGBT people look superficial, vindictive and juvenile—everything that we as a community have worked hard to overcome.’”

Private boycotts are one thing. But Anthony notes that it’s different when governments have gotten involved, because that involves the threat of coercion.

Banned in Boston

Other attacks on Cathy have come from Boston and Chicago. Both are understandable. Boston is even more intolerant than San Francisco, the very center of Puritan intolerance and haughtiness. Nowadays they’re not religious Puritans, but secular Puritans. Mayor Thomas Menino threatened, “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it”

Imagine that! No place for freedom on the Freedom Trail.

Boston’s famed intolerance, of course, originated the phrase “banned in Boston.” And it was just a few clicks north that their fellow Puritans burned  witches not so long ago. And check out that cover of a book on witches, image at the top. The book was printed in “Boston in N.E.” in 1702. It reads, “How Persons Guilty of that Crime may be Convicted.” Boston 1702 = Boston 2012 = Chicago 2012 = San Francisco 2012.

Chicago is notorious for having the most corrupt political machine in all America, which is saying a lot. In the Windy City, the dead not only walk, they vote. That’s also where we got the phrase, “Vote early and often.”

In Chicago, an alderman, Joe Moreno, banned Chick-fil-A from opening a store. Moreno was backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the notoriously foul-mouthed former chief-of-staff of President Obama. Emanuel said, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values. They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents. This would be a bad investment, since it would be empty.”

What a typical socialist. He thinks he knows how to run somebody else’s business, and how it will do. Meanwhile, while Emanuel and Moreno were wasting time on their own immense intolerance, Chicago’s murder rate has been soaring. For them, it’s tolerance for murderers, intolerance for someone just voicing his religious opinion.

It’s also worth pointing out that, not only is Cathy’s position the same as Obama’s last year, it’s the same as that of most Americans today, and of most American religious groups today.

Left-tyranny

Gregory again:

“While the most consistent left-liberal voices for civil liberties, among them the ACLU, have defended Chick-fil-A’s right to open a business regardless of the proprietor’s political views, there has been far too much silence or even enthusiasm toward these threats of political coercion, which carry potentially totalitarian implications. A government that can prohibit people from engaging in peaceful commerce based on traditional cultural and conservative political values is as big a threat to civil liberties as anything the left imagines a conservative Big Brother poses….

“Civil liberties are grounded in key principles of a free society, including an unflinching distrust in secular government and a respect for property rights. Without property rights, bodily integrity, freedom from censorship, and guarantees against lawless prosecution are impossible to maintain. Without distrusting government, society loses sight of the importance of civil liberties in the first place. The left has long attempted to marry a loyalty to civil liberties with a trust in government and an attitude toward property ranging from ambivalence to hostility. This contradictory approach to the principal issues of a just society fundamentally explains the unreliability and hypocrisy so often seen with many progressives when civil liberties are under attack.”

Right.

Lee, Menino, Moreno and Emanuel unfortunately are part of a rising trend in America of Left-intolerance, of using government coercion to suppress First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. This long has happened in Europe and Canada.

In America, this tyrannical trend needs to be stopped. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Eat dinner tonight at Chick-fil-A.