This morning, I listened to about 10 minutes of the Stephanie Miller Show on Air America as I ran out to get a coffee.

During the mind-numbingly inane banter (Miller’s show makes Fox & Friends sound like the Oxford Union Debating Society), Miller and her sidekicks started talking about a sign at one of the tea party protests that apparently said, “Don’t Tax Me, Bro.”

Okay. Not very funny. But Miller’s take?

“Isn’t ‘Bro’ pretty clearly a slang reference to African-Americans?”

Miller’s sidekick: “Yeah, it’s pretty thinly-veiled racism.”

Or, dumbasses, it could be a play on the “Don’t Taze Me, Bro” kid from last year’s presidential campaign and the catchphrase he spawned. He was white, by the way.

This exchange, incidentally, came less than five minutes after an astonishingly racist bit in which one of Miller’s sidekicks read a love letter to Condolleeza Rice in the voice of Kim Jong Il. The bit managed to cram just about every Asian stereotype you can think of–along with a few black ones–into two minutes of unfunny radio. But you had to listen carefully to pick them up because of the guy’s exaggerated mispronunciation of Ls and Rs.

It was honestly worse than anything I’ve ever heard on Imus. But I guess so long as you hold enlightened, progressive views on tax policy, and the targets of your humor happen to be black Republicans, you get to do all the racist comedy bits you want.

What’s amazing is the complete lack of awareness from Miller and her dopey sidekicks as the show transitioned from the overtly racist love letter bit to them wrongly and moronically ascribing a racist message to a completely innocuous tea party sign.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I hate right-wing talk radio, too.)

I have a piece at The Daily Beast today using Obama’s trip to Mexico as a hook for a broader discussion of his drug policy. Good: Ending the medical marijuana raids (or so we’ve been told). Bad: Exporting the disastrous Plan Columbia to Afghanistan, trying to bring back Byrne Grants. The same: just about everything else.

Also, Constantino Diaz-Duran’s piece on the queens of Mexico’s drug cartels is really interesting.

So I just completed the 2.5 hour drive from D.C. to Charlottesville for my speech at UVA tonight. Beautiful drive.

Along the way, I listened to some left-wing talk radio, specifically Ed Schultz. And wow. The left’s blathering idiots really are just a mirror image of the right’s, aren’t they? Cognitive dissonance, disingenuous bullshitting, demagoguery, and hateful invective all over the place. It was really something to behold.

Apparently without the slightest hint of irony, Schultz started by casting off the tea party protesters as “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” Yep. Bush has been out of office for all of three months, and the left has already adopted the “people who disagree with us hate America” crap. He then characterized tea partiers exercising their right to free speech and protest as “trying to overturn the results of an election.” Another page ripped from the right-wing playbook. Just substitute “anti-war protests” for “tea parties.”

But Schultz wasn’t done. He then said the tea party movement is primarily fueled by racism, and the parties are attended by people who can’t stand the fact that a black man was elected president. He said the whole protest was fueled by hate and “white power” supporters.

Then it got worse. Schultz actually said that Fox News anchors were secretly hoping for shots to be fired, for government officials to be killed, and for an ensuing violent overthrow of the government. He strongly implied that tea party organizers want Obama to be assassinated. He equated Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s statement in support of the 10th Amendment this week as akin to support for a bloody revolution.

This guy isn’t fringe, either. DCCC chairman and Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen was one of Schultz’s guests today. Schultz also has an evening show on MSNBC, where Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs will be his guest tonight.

Schultz’s bumper described him as the most-listened to liberal talk show host on the radio. God help us if that’s true. You have guys like Schultz gobbling up listeners on the left, and people like Hannity, Rush, and Savage gobbling them up on the right . . . and it’s we libertarians who get tarred as nut-jobs.

Quentin Tarantino guided the contestants through movie tune night tonight, and nobody picked a song from a Tarantino movie. Here’s how I’d rank them:

Kris Allen
His best performance so far. He sang the song “Falling Slowly,” which I’d never heard, but just bought. Beautiful song, beautiful arrangement, and some really nice restraint from Allen in the way he sang it. It’s the first time I’ve really liked his performance. Sorta’ sounded like Rufus Wainwright.

Adam Lambert
Wasn’t his best, but even at 80 percent, he’s phenomenal. Incredible sense of theater and flash. I’m sure Steppenwolf fans won’t be happy with the way he glammed up the song. Doesn’t matter. The guy’s a star.

Anoop Desai
I hate Bryan Adams, but Desai was really impressive again tonight. This is his groove — the souled-up pop ballad. The liberties he took with the melody were spot-on. Bought himself another week or two at least.

Danny Gokey

He actually sounded like Lionel Richie for the first third of the song. Again, I wish the guy would pick a song you don’t constantly hear treacling through your typical mall department store, but, once again, he can flat out sing. He’s middle of the pack this week, but I’m sure he’ll be fine in the voting.

Allison Iraheta

I’m a fan, but that cheesy Aerosmith song is really a waste of her talent. Didn’t like it at all. Simon Cowell said she’s the last best hope for the girls. Given that there are only two of them left, I guess that was a dig on Lil Rounds.

Matt Giraud

Again, I’m a Giraud fan. But again, I hate Bryan Adams. There’s no soul in Brian Adams. And “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman” is such dreadful pap. It was a bad song, and he didn’t sing it particularly well. And there are so many other great movie songs he could have chosen. There’s a decentchance he’ll get voted off this week. But there’s also a pretty good chance that if he does, the judges will give him another week.

Lil Rounds

Okay, so I’ll confess. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I do like the song “The Rose.” And I love gospel music. So I should like a gospelled-up version of “The Rose.” But she was all over the place. It just didn’t work. I think the judges are ready for her to go. Guess we’ll see if the audience is, too. Probably the most disappointing contestant this year.

Courtesy of the Pentagon’s surplus program.

And frankly, it looks like that’s the last thing they need.

Hey, Dems. Here’s a policy proposal for you: How about ending these Pentagon giveaways to local police departments? This stuff was designed for the battlefield. It has no place on America’s streets, being used against American citizens.

My friend Tim Lee pithily observed on Twitter that the tea partiers are in a lot of ways similar to the anti-war protesters from several years ago. I tend to agree with them, but they make it very difficult to take them seriously. And like the anti-war folks, they’re letting their cause get hijacked by a variety of other causes, too, including anti-immigration and anti-gay protesters, and, now, many of the mainstream GOP hacks that had no problem growing the federal government back when they were in power.

All of that said, the following video made my day. Mass Media Research Center email deluge to the FCC starts in 5…4…3…

Oops.

James and Sheila Slaughter said that when they answered the door of their home in San Luis, Ariz., on a July afternoon last year, they were surprised to find five armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers strapped into bulky bulletproof vests accusing them of harboring an illegal immigrant.

“Is this ‘Candid Camera’?” Mrs. Slaughter recalled asking.

That irritated the lead officer, her husband said Tuesday. “He said: ‘No, it isn’t “Candid Camera.” You need to step back into the middle of the room.’ ”

The couple said they complied, and the officers prepared to search their home. Mr. Slaughter, a six-foot, 285-pound former Marine, said he then told them, “Look fellas, do you guys realize that I’m a U.S. Customs K-9 officer at the San Luis land port?”

“The lead officer’s eyes got about as big and round as silver dollars, and the three guys who were standing just inside the door went straight outside,” said Mr. Slaughter, 51, who with a Labrador retriever, Whitey, searches cars at the Mexican border for narcotics. “They left without saying a word. They knew they messed up.”…

Mr. Slaughter, whose family lives on East 26th Street, said he learned later that the illegal immigrant sought by the officers lived on East 26th Place. He recognized the immigrant’s name from junk mail that accidentally came to the Slaughter home.

The officers, Mr. Slaughter said, should have checked the name on property records, “or they could have watched me walk out of my house every day wearing my uniform.”

“They bullied their way into my house — the same organization that I work for, doing 16-hour shifts,” Mr. Slaughter said. “I bleed red, white and blue. I serve my country, and then they do this to me?”

The Slaughters are suing each of the five officers for $500,000.

George Will urges the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down an Illinois law that may be the next step in post-bailout, post-Kelo America: direct transfer of the profits of successful industries to the accounts of those that are failing. The Illinois law attempts to prop up the state’s sagging horse racing industry by requiring the state’s four most profitable casinos to simply hand over 3 percent of gross receipts to Illinois’ horse racing tracks. The bill was recently upheld by the state’s supreme court.

Will writes:

What is to prevent legislators from taking revenue from Wal-Mart and giving it to local retailers? Or from chain drugstores to local pharmacies? Not the tattered remnant of the Constitution’s takings clause.

The Fifth Amendment says that private property shall not “be taken for public use without just compensation” (emphasis added). Fifty state constitutions also stipulate taking only for public uses. But the Illinois Supreme Court ignored the public-use question. Instead, the court said it is “well settled” that the takings clause applies only to government’s exercise of its eminent domain power regarding land, buildings and other tangible or intellectual property — but not money…

Suppose Congress, eager to aid newspapers hurt by competition from new information technologies, decides to take a percentage of the assets of Bill Gates and half a dozen other beneficiaries of those technologies and give the money to newspapers. Would not this “take and transfer” scheme be unconstitutional? Targeting specific, identifiable persons or entities for unfavorable treatment, and transferring their assets to equally identifiable persons or entities, surely also raises equal protection issues. Unquestionably a legislature can impose a levy on casinos if the revenue becomes subject to what the state legislators’ brief calls “allocation via the familiar push and pull of political decision-making.” But Illinois’ confiscation of riverboat revenue is a private-pockets-to-private-pockets transfer, without even laundering the money through the state treasury.

So how many months before we see one or more items from Will’s parade of horribles turn up in actual legislation?

In the introduction an otherwise interesting piece on the dark side of the Dubai boom (and looming crash), Johnathan Hari writes:

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

Give me a break. There’s nothing “neo-liberal” about Dubai. It’s also not a “metaphor” for some idealized vision of globalization. For the uninitiated, “neo-liberalism,” is another term for classical liberalism, which, roughly speaking, is European for what we call libertarianism in the U.S.

I’ll start by acknowledging that to the extent that Dubai has opened the Arab world to foreign investors, to commerce, to new ideas and influences, and that it has provided jobs and income to poor laborers who otherwise would have neither, its explosive development has had some benefits. And to the extent that much of the Arab world has for centuries isolated itself from the rest of the world, and reaped all the problems associated with said isolation, Dubai is a step in the right direction.

But there’s nothing neo-liberal about the problems with Dubai that Harri lays out in his article. Indentured servitude and slavery aren’t at all compatible with neo-liberalism, a philosophy grounded in the notion that a man owns his own body, and owns the the product of his own labor. Mass violations of human rights aren’t “neo-liberal,” either. Nor are the U.A.E’s restrictions on the rights of women, or its draconian treatment of homosexuals. Monarchies aren’t “neo-liberal,” either.

Neo-liberalism celebrates progress and economic development when both are driven by the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Much of the development in Dubai has been driven by its government, sometimes through fiat, with the aid and funding of foreign investors. The poor infrastructure in Dubai isn’t the result of capitalism run amok, but of Sheikh Mohammed recklessly and rapidly implementing his various grand, poorly-planned visions. None of this is free market. It’s state-driven corporatism. It’s not in any way an extension of the neo-liberal tradition of Locke, Ricardo, Smith, & Co.

There’s a tendency among media, particularly the left-leaning media, to conflate anything corporate with free markets and free market philosophy. If corporations benefit, free market ideologues must love it. That just isn’t true. It’s shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what liberalism (in the European sense) is all about.

Reminds me of the opera guy from last year.

Here are the details:

The Militarization of Main Street

A Talk by Radley Balko

Radley Balko, a senior editor of Reason magazine, will discuss how the drug war has turned our cops into soldiers, and America’s streets into battlefields.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 7:30 p.m.
Wilson Hall, Room 301

Sponsored by Students for Individual Liberty and ACLU at UVA.

CORRECTION: This entry originally had another bullet point that was a separate account of the same Illinois raid mentioned above.

Kid Can’t Figure Out How To Kick Ball – Watch more Funny Videos

Here’s a question: The U.S. and most western governments generally have a policy of not negotiating with kidnappers, terrorists, and the like. The thinking is that you don’t want to reward criminal behavior, and you want to avoid setting a bad precedent so you don’t induce future incidents. That probably makes sense as a national policy. But it stinks if you happen to be one of the people kidnapped. Or related to them.

Let’s say Somali pirates take over a private vessel owned by Americans, and ask for a $1 million ransom for the safe return of the crew.

If they’re able to raise the money, should the family, friends, and/or corporation that owns the vessel be permitted to pay the ransom?

Or should we let the government step in and forbid them from paying it?

If you’re in the latter camp, what criteria would you apply in deciding when to let the government step in? Should the government be empowered to forbid paying a ransom in any kidnapping? Just kidnappings that have national security implications? Only overseas kidnappings?

Suppose the crew’s families somehow managed to pay the ransom, anyway. Should we put someone in prison for paying to remove a loved one from harm?

Via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed, check out this astonishing bit of anonymous sourcing by the Politico’s Ben Smith:

The White House is denying that the president bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at a G-20 meeting in London, a scene that drew criticism on the right and praise from some Arab outlets.

“It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” said an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This is ridiculous to the point of parody. There are occasions when anonymous sources are necessary—for the most part, when you have a source who’s providing information about some sort of malfeasance who credibly fears repercussions for passing on what he knows.

This was nothing like that. This was an Obama aide using the cloak of anonymity to make a self-serving, overtly political, patently ridiculous argument he’d never have the guts to make under his own name. Smith and Politico should have laughed this aide off the phone.

Unfortunately, this has become fairly common with Washington journalists. Political reporters crave access. Political operatives know it, and dish it out accordingly. They can dump this crap to a half dozen reporters, then reward those who do them the favor of publishing it with exclusive interviews, a question at the next press conference, or a leaked scoop on some big announcement. The vast majority of the anonymous sourcing you see in Beltway beat stories today has zero to do with whistle blowing. It’s just self-serving flackery.

That doesn’t mean you have to let yourself be used like this, though. Hope Smith at least feels a little dirty.

You’d think the high-profile incident in Dallas a couple of weeks ago would have registered a little better than this.

Dr. Ziworitin says he was rushing to UMC early Monday morning when an officer pulled him over near Rancho and Alta, “I may have briefly made a stop, and right there pulled my ID card which boldly says UMC and I said, ‘I am a physician going to the hospital.’”

Dr. Ziworitin says he then continued a few blocks to UMC, driving into a secure doctors’ parking lot which requires a badge to enter. The officer followed him in.

“The officer stepped out of his car and told me to stop and freeze. I explained, ‘Officer, I am sorry. I don’t want to be rude. I am a physician, there is an emergency, and I have to go.’”

Dr. Ziworitin says what happened next was shocking, “The officer proceeded to pull out his gun, point it at my face, and told me to lay face down on the ground, which I did. At this point, my ID card dropped on the floor and I remember him stepping on me, probably putting his knee on my back, and then cuffed me.”

Still cuffed, Dr. Ziworitin says he was put up against the police car as the officer called UMC to verify his employment, “Immediately after that call he proceeded to uncuff me and I ran upstairs to go take care of the emergency.”

Dr. Ziworitin says he delivered a baby and later called Metro’s Internal Affairs Division.

Even if the cop doubted this guy was a doctor, the cuffs, gunpoint, and a boot in the back all seem more than a little excessive, no?

In anticipation of his new album, the next ten editions of Five Star Fridays will feature my ten favorite Bob Dylan songs. This week at number 10, we’ll go with “Most of the Time” from Oh Mercy, a churning, brooding, lonely tune about a guy trying to delude himself into thinking he’s over his woman.

Apparently as part of its new effort to flex its proprietary muscle over the Internet, an Associated Press regional manager recently sent out a threatening letter to a country music station for posting A.P. news videos on its website without authorization.

The station’s operation manager humbly pointed out that if the news company doesn’t want websites embedding its videos, it should probably stop posting said videos, with embedding code, to the A.P. YouTube channel.

Arnold Kling:

“From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people’s money.”

It’s amazing how generous some people are with other people’s money.

Amy Poehler’s character (a local government empployee) in the new TV series Parks and Recreation:

“This is where the rubber of government meets the road of actual human beings.”

And finally, reader James D, from the comments section:

“If there is ONE group of people in this country who deserve free/socialized medicine, it’s the military.”

James D hates our troops.

(Note: I understand and appreciate his sentiment. I’m kidding, here. Sort of.)

A mother in Alabama was released after nine months in prison when several forensic pathologists said Alabama medical examiner Dr. Corinne Stern misdiagnosed an infant’s cause of death. The state’s chief medical examiner now plans to re-open 100 prior homicide cases in which Stern performed the autopsy.

The judge said in 30 years of law practice he had never seen an expert make a mistake so bad. He praised District Attorney Chris McCool for listening to a defense expert who raised the first red flags about the flawed autopsy.

“What has happened in this courtroom today is absolutely unprecedented,” said Moore.

Police found out about the baby when a couple who had been lined up to adopt the child called authorities. Lee told police what happened, but Stern’s autopsy concluded the baby was suffocated.

The body had bruises on the forehead and mouth, she wrote, indicating the use of force.

Once Lee’s defense questioned the autopsy, McCool got other experts to review the case. Evidence during the hearing showed six different forensics experts found the baby died of pneumonia caused by an infection and was stillborn. What Stern thought were bruises were actually signs of decomposition.

Stern is now working as the medical examiner for Webb County, Texas.

Troubling as Stern’s mistake is, the DA, judge, and chief medical examiner in Alabama deserve a ton of credit for recognizing the problem, addressing it head-on instead of covering it up, and taking measures to see what other damage Stern may have done during her time in Alabama.

Mississippi, are you listening?