Earlier this week, the El Paso, Texas city council passed a resolution with 12 steps the U.S. and Mexican governments might take to quell the violence in Juárez, Mexico, El Paso’s sister city just over the border.  Juárez saw 1,600 homicides last year, with 20 more already this year.

But it was the twelfth and final recommendation that brought out El Paso Mayor John Cook’s veto pen: The city council unanimously voted to urge both governments to at least study and open debate about the possibility of legalizing narcotics.

It’s encouraging that the city council managed to pass the resolution without a dissenting vote.  It’s disappointing that in calling for no more than study and discussion, the resolution met only derision and dismissal from the mayor and from El Paso’s congressman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas).

Nancy Pelosi in 2004:

House Democrats’ anger at heavy-handed Republican tactics reached a new level yesterday, with the chamber’s top Democrat asking the House speaker to embrace a “Bill of Rights” for the minority, regardless which party it is.

[...]

Pelosi’s document, which she vows to honor if Democrats regain the majority, says: “Too often, incivility and the heavy hand of the majority” have silenced Democrats and choked off “thoughtful debate.” She called on the majority to let the minority offer meaningful amendments and substitutes to important bills; to limit roll-call votes to the normal 15 minutes rather than keeping them open to round up needed votes; and to let all appointees to House-Senate conference committees participate in meetings and decisions.

“When we are shut out, they are shutting out the great diversity of America,” Pelosi said in an interview. “We want a return to civility; we want to set a higher standard.”

[...]

Democrats and several analysts say recommital votes are largely meaningless. Hastert’s leadership team portrays them as “procedural votes” rather than matters of policy, and unwritten parliamentary rules make it essentially treasonous for lawmakers to vote against their party’s leadership on procedural matters.

The inevitable party-line vote that keeps Democrats from recommitting a Republican bill “is the whole ballgame,” Ornstein said, because it prevents Democrats from having a debate and a vote on the substance of their alternative proposals.

Nancy Pelosi, 2008:

The spirit of bipartisan cooperation didn’t survive the first day of the 111th Congress as House Democrats pushed through a package of rule changes Tuesday that the furious Republican minority said trampled their traditional rights to affect legislation.

[...]

The most contentious rule change places new restrictions on motions to “recommit” a bill for new amendments to the committee that approved it. In practice, that motion often meant a lengthy or even permanent delay in passing the measure. Motions to recommit would still be possible, but the new rules allow the full House to reconsider the bill almost instantaneously.

[...]

Because of the special rules regarding budgetary legislation, Republicans argued that the new restrictions on motions to recommit will hobble their ability to challenge tax increases that are included in larger, “must-pass” bills.

Unlike in the Senate, where the threat of a filibuster gives the minority strong bargaining leverage, the minority party in the House has relatively few tools to challenge the majority’s will. Mr. Dreier noted that the recommit motion had been in place for 100 years, and he rejected Democratic claims that the new rules were a minor tweak to an obscure parliamentary proceeding.

In Congress, he said, “process is substance.”

It’s a somewhat complicated procedural issue, but the bottom line here is that while Pelosi demanded minority rights and decried GOP procedural chicanery while her party was in the minority, she’s starting the new Congress by pushing through rules changes that would make it much more difficult for Republicans to have any influence on pending legislation.

Pelosi gets a 7 out of 10 on the somewhat arbitrary Hackery Index.

HackWatch installment on Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) here, on former White House Office of Legal Counsel honcho John Yoo here. If you see an example of a pundit, politician, major blogger, or other Beltway creature who’s done a 180 on this or another issue, please send it here, with links, and “HackWatch” in the subject line.

This isn’t looking good:

It was 2 a.m. on December 31 when Tolan and his cousin, Anthony Cooper, were confronted in the driveway of their home by Bellaire, Texas, police officers. Police officials say the officers suspected the two young men were driving a stolen car.

Bellaire is a prominent, mostly white suburb in southwest Houston.

[...]

Tolan’s relatives say the two young men had just arrived from a late-night run to a Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant.

As they walked up the driveway to their home, Anthony Cooper said an unidentified man emerged from the darkness with a flashlight and a gun pointed at them.

“We did not know it was a police officer,” said Cooper. “He said, ‘Stop. Stop.’ And we were like, ‘Why? Who are you?’”

The officers ordered both men to lie down on the ground. Tolan’s parents heard the commotion and came outside. Police will only say an “altercation” took place. Tolan’s family say it involved his mother.

“The cop pushed her against the wall,” said Tolan’s uncle, Mike Morris.

Relatives say Tolan started to lean up from the ground to ask the officer what he was doing to his mother. That’s when the family says Tolan was shot in the chest, the bullet piercing his lung and then lodging in his liver.

But Tolan’s SUV wasn’t stolen. Both men were unarmed and relatives say they were hardly a threat to the police officer.

Tolan happens to be the son of a former major league baseball player, and is in the early stages of his own pro baseball career. The police department initially denied racial profiling played a role, but has now stopped talking about the case publicly, saying only that “they’re investigating how the officers on the scene mistakenly determined that the SUV Tolan and his cousin were driving had been stolen.”

Even if there had been an SUV reported stolen that night that looked like the one Tolan’s cousin was driving, you first have to wonder why the cops wouldn’t run the plates before ordering everyone out of the truck at gunpoint. And that’s before you start looking at the shooting, and the confrontation with Tolan’s mother.

If there wasn’t an SUV reported stolen that night that looked like the one Tolan was in, this is going to get really, really ugly.

All hail the rise of “soft paternalism:”

The incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama will name Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who pioneered efforts to design regulation around the ways people behave, as regulatory czar, the Wall Street Journal reported.

A report on WSJ.com said Sunstein would head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, overseeing “regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”

Will Wilkinson slapped around Sunstein’s Nudge in the October 2008 issue of Reason.

Great piece from the February issue of Reason just went online.

Alexander Zaitchik traveled to Mexico to experience a “theme park” that mimics an illegal border crossing. Snippet

Then there are the screams that come from behind the bushes. During quiet lulls in the walk, female park employees periodically issue bloodcurdling cries that echo through the mountains. It is not an overly histrionic touch. Rape has become so endemic to the border crossing experience that women often start taking birth control before making the trip, expecting abuse from coyotes or the bandits that travel with them. “Even if a woman is traveling with a brother or cousin, they are at the mercy of the coyotes for survival,” says Walt Staton, spokesperson for No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that provides assistance to migrants on both sides of the border.

Nobody actually gets raped, robbed, or murdered during the Night Hike, but the simulation is not for the weak of heart or the pregnant. There are full-speed runs down steep unlit paths as sirens wail in pursuit and stretches along raging river waters where the mire is almost knee high. In most countries participants would be required to sign multiple waivers before even getting in the back of the truck. During periodic breaks, everybody collapses in exhaustion, many tending to bloody knees and sprained ankles.

…or at least the website.

I have a piece up at ESPN.com today chiding politicians for meddling with college football, and for sticking their grubby paws in the sports world in general.

From the L.A. Times:

The Los Angeles Police Department waged an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to convince coroner’s officials to change their finding that a SWAT officer’s bullet killed a 19-month-old girl held hostage by her father three years ago, according to records reviewed by The Times.

The intense lobbying effort, which involved one of the department’s highest-ranking officials, led to significant friction between the LAPD and coroner’s office. It also raises questions about whether the LAPD crossed an ethical line in pushing so hard, some medical and law enforcement experts said.

The department rested its case on self-serving conclusions by a four-year ballistics investigator with no medical training, challenging a team of experienced medical examiners in the county coroner’s office.

The department tried repeatedly to find a pathologist to review the case, according to the LAPD’s case log, which shows that Hudson tried to contact at least eight outside experts. One of the requests was made to the U.S. military’s pathology institute. When the institute refused to accept the case, Berkow formally appealed to the Department of Defense and was turned down again, records show.

The LAPD’s search led eventually to Dr. William Oliver, a forensic pathologist at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. For a $2,000 consulting fee, Oliver agreed to review the case in the summer of 2006, according to the LAPD’s internal case log of the investigation. His conclusions, however, were not what the LAPD wanted to hear.

“There is little or no good evidence that the wound is from . . . a handgun,” he wrote.

I don’t agree with how often and under what circumstances LAPD deploys its SWAT team.  But it is worth noting that this incident aside, they are extremely well-trained, and have a near-spotless record.

That said, while there’s nothing wrong with seeking an outside opinion, there’s plenty wrong with pressuring the coroner to change his findings before seeking an outside opinion. Kudos to the L.A. county coroner for holding his ground.

I guess it’s generally a good thing that former Mississippi District Attorney Ed Peters won’t be practicing law anymore.

It’s just revealing of the state’s priorities that a trial lawyer-tinged bribery scandal is what finally forced him to give up his license—not the fact that he conspired with a judge and another prosecutor to keep an innocent man in prison for 12 years.

Crikey, this is creepy:

The announcement, from the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, requests “a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with virtual renditions of deployed Service Members.” The application must “produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families … using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying ‘I love you’, or ‘I miss you’, or ‘Good night mommy/daddy.’ “

I’d have to agree with Andrew Sullivan’s readers. I’m sure there were many nominees for his “worst quote of the year” competition but the winner, from Ben Stein, is really, really loathesome.

There’s a little spot in Arlington, Virginia called the Liberty Tavern. It’s a popular watering hole and meet-up point for D.C.-area libertarians, in part I guess because of the name, but more likely because it’s a short hop from the George Mason Law School, home to the libertarian non-profits the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Jacob Grier notes that Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has teamed up with the owners of the Liberty Tavern to relaunch his campaign for a Virginia statewide smoking ban.

If you live in the area, you might want to keep that in mind when deciding where to spend your beer and bar food budget. Better yet, drop the tavern’s owners a note to let them know why you’ll no longer patronize them.

Sorry for the light blogging. I’ve hit a wall of deadlines this week. Good news is, I hope to have some good stuff coming up next week, including an explosive new story involving our friends Dr. Hayne and Dr. West.

Hat tip: PJ Doland.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I’m really only linking to this story because I’m proud of my headline, and wanted to use it.

Bruce Mirken sends this summary of items seized by various DOJ agencies in 2008 that have been “placed into official use.”

The FBI apparently found official uses for $120,000 in seized jewelry and $134 in pornography.

Weirder, the U.S. Postal Service apparently found an “official use” for one dollar’s worth of pornography.

Makes sense.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion in the comments about this video.

I know only what everyone else does, which is what’s in the news report.

My take: The way the officer who fired his gun throws his hands in the air after firing the shot, it looks like an accident—that he didn’t intend for the gun to go off.  If that’s the case, I suspect the investigation will center around whether it was proper for him to have drawn the gun in the first place.

Per Jacob Sullum’s post at Hit & Run on the John Yoo/John Bolton piece in the New York Times, I think we have a new addition to our HackWatch feature.  Yoo, who under President Bush has argued that the president has the power to unilaterally withdraw from treaties, now wants the Senate to reassert its treaty power, because he fears the sorts of entanglements into which President-Elect Obama might get us enmeshed.

Yoo gets an 9 out of 10 on the somewhat-arbitrary Hackery Index.  The only ameliorating factor, here, is that Yoo’s hackery seems more issue-oriented than strictly party-oriented. That is, he isn’t explicitly arguing that Republican presidents should have more power than Democratic presidents.  Rather, he believes the president should have  plenary power to negate treaties pertaining issues broadly related national security, but wants the Senate to reassert itself on treaties related to domestic policy.  Of course, the issues where Yoo wants plenary executive power happen to be issues where he agrees with Republicans, and the issues where he wants more Senate control are those issues where he doesn’t trust Obama.  But Yoo does at least have a constitutional argument for making the distinction. It just happens to be a crappy one.

If you see an example of a pundit, politician, major blogger, or other Beltway creature who’s done a 180 on this or another issue, please send it to us, with links, and “HackWatch” in the subject line.

Last year, we honored New Mexico police officer Sam Costales, for having the courage to testify in court to abuses by other officers, and was promptly punished for it.

This year’s award goes to former Vancouver, Washington police officers Navin Sharma and Chris Kershaw.

The Injustice in Seattle blog has their stories.

Cop mistakes penis for gun – Watch more Free Videos