Minnesota has a poor track record with governors in the last few years. Jesse Ventura was an original, but originality doesn’t make up for insanity. The man they’ve replaced him with, Governor Tim Pawlenty, is a lot more dignified, far less frightening, but just as crazy nonetheless, if his proposal of March 28 remains on the table.

That proposal is to charge people arrested for protesting a portion of the bill for the time it takes police to arrest them. For instance, if someone gets arrested protesting by themselves, the time ought to be minimal. If they happen to be arrested in a large group of people, the bill will increase to an expected $200 or $300 per protester, tacked onto whatever fines they face at their sentencing.

Never mind the fact that this is a gross insult to the First Amendment, since it doesn’t do anything about those murderers who require more investigators to solve their crime or speeders who evade the police for greater periods of time. Those people will be treated just the same as they ever were. This is just a target to those evil people who want to participate in government.

The bill is a ridiculous backhanded attempt to eliminate protest, something that seems painfully unsurprising.

For one, there is something to be considered in the way this bill would affect people in a partisan manner. I’ll just admit it right now. Everyone on earth who is convinced that there is a liberal media bias is utterly and pathetically wrong. There may be bias among individual members of the media — say, Geraldo Rivera, Peter Arnett or me, who has surprisingly weathered the war unscathed in comparison. But it’s not as if every time I begin to write a sentence I donate money to Amnesty International and pray for the eradication of private property. Frankly, if there’s a liberal media bias, it’s done a lousy job, because there hasn’t been a president representing actual liberal causes since Jimmy Carter and our nation has gone more Republican in my lifetime than it had in ages.

But if you’re still convinced, here’s a good reason why you might think liberals run the media that’s actually owned by huge corporations — the enemy of crazed pinkos like me — liberals are loud. Whether it’s Michael Moore at the Academy Awards, war protesters at the corner of Welch and Union Drive or me at my computer, liberals have lots of unions, complaints, protests and diatribes.

Conservatives … well, they have a lot of votes from a lot of individual voters. Frankly, aside from Fox News analysts, magazine columnists and your occasional pro-life rallies, the right wing is pretty silent about things.

It isn’t as if our own Republican guard was storming the campus with signs spouting “Iraq war now” or “Links to terrorism are obvious.” No, they just complained about the United Nations or the way things were being slowed by bureaucracy, without ever forming a big, frothing mass of anger. Rush Limbaugh listeners take turns saying the same thing, whereas the people on the corner do it all together.

That’s exactly why this is such a troublesome bill. The nature of the difference that was supposed to exist between the right and the left wings was an orientation about the private and public nature of the world. The liberals, well, they aren’t all after eliminating private property, but they are more in favor of limiting the things private corporations can do and allowing the government to have a larger role in correcting society’s problems, like hauling people off to prison for their hash pipes. Conservatives want government to leave individual people and corporations alone.

Small government, small government, small government is the key. People should take care of their own damned selves and avoid counting on government, except to haul them off to prison for their hash pipes.

But one of the key elements of the Republican party is self-sufficiency. To them, if you need a group of people to protest with to make your voice heard, you not only don’t count, you should never count.

So maybe Pawlenty is telling the truth and this has nothing to do with people protesting Bush’s nonwar police action in Iraq. But frankly, it doesn’t matter. It never has, it never will. People could be protesting anything from the WTO, the execution of Mumia or just about anything else, but if they’re doing it in groups rather than letters to the newspaper or call-ins to talk radio, it’s probably the liberals doing it.

It’s just us crazed liberals in the media that you see going it alone. Maybe we’re just the anti-social type, even if we are pro-socialist, but for whatever reason, we’re the exception that Tim Pawlenty wants to make the rule.