Feds attacked in border states, Montana and South Dakota

Looking through FBI statistics, I came upon a table showing the number of federal law enforcement agents who had been assaulted by state in 2010. The top four, unsurprisingly, are Arizona, California, Texas, and New Mexico--the border states. Trying to stop unwanted people and paraphernalia from coming into the country is dangerous work.

What does puzzle me are the next two, Montana and South Dakota, respectively. I thought maybe it had something to do with Native Americans, but Oklahoma and North Carolina, which both have larger indigenous populations than Montana or South Dakota do, are way down at the bottom of the list. Indeed, outside the border states plus Montana and South Dakota, assaults are negligible. Those six states constituted 72% of all assaults on federal agents throughout the entire country. Any ideas?

Ron Paul's thick blue line

The fact that Ron Paul blows the rest of the GOP presidential field out of the water when it comes to campaign contributions from military personnel is one that the Republican establishment can't profitably address. This isn't 1975. In 2012, US military personnel are among the most respected and honored people in the country. Consequently, asserting that the soldiers making the contributions are "nutty" or "disgusting" as they do Ron Paul isn't viable.

So it ends up being discussed on leftist networks like MSNBC more than it does on neocon organs like Fox News or in the WSJ, where ignoring it is the favored tactic. The working assumption among those who do confront it is that those who are on the ground actually doing the legwork for the nation-building efforts that define contemporary US foreign policy are the most strongly opposed to them. It serves as a pretty powerful endorsement of Paul's views.

But occupations aside, Paul's civilian base of support--conservative- and libertarian-leaning young men--is demographically similar to that of active US military personnel. So it's conceivable that this overlap, more than any specific affinity for Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy, explains his popularity among American soldiers.

The country's police forces are comprised of men and women cut from a similar cloth as its military personnel are, but in their day-to-day lives, police officers are presumably a lot more concerned about domestic policy issues and correspondingly less focused on foreign policy than their military brothers are.

Following this line of reasoning, I went to the FEC's website and downloaded the donor listing for all individuals who listed "police" as their employer or occupation through the end of 2011, and then backed out MPs from those listings. The proceeding table ranks all 2012 (current and former) presidential aspirants who have received campaign donations from those in police forces across the country by the amount of money each has taken in:

Candidate	$ received
1. Barack Obama	$26,836
2. Ron Paul	$10,896
3. Newt Gingrich	$3,760
4. Rick Perry	$3,120
5. Herman Cain	$3,067
6. Michelle Bachmann	$2,925
7. Mitt Romney	$2,137
8. Rick Santorum	$1,830
9. Tim Pawlenty	$250
10. Charles 'Buddy' Roemer	$165

In contrast to military money, nearly two-thirds of which flows to the GOP candidates, police money is almost evenly split among Republicans and Democrats (Obama). Paul's police advantage over the rest of the GOP field is not as gargantuan as his $6-to-$1 military advantage is, but he still beats the next highest Republican recipient by a $3-to-$1 margin.

To the extent, then, that this crude attempt to tease out how much of Paul's support among the military is due to his non-interventionist foreign policy and how much is due to the general appeal of a less intrusive, less bureaucratic, and less powerful federal government to right-leaning young guys full of testosterone is useful, it suggests the answer resides somewhere in between.