David Schultz, a reporter for the NPR affiliate WAMU in D.C., had his microphone, headphones, and a digital recorder seized by police and PR reps from the Veterans Administration when he interviewed veteran Tommy Canady at a public town hall meeting in D.C. yesterday.

Canady was attempting to tell Schultz about the poor treatment he says he’s been getting from the VA hospital. VA officials claim Schultz didn’t identify himself as a reporter, failed to obtain a VA-approved waiver before speaking with Canady, was both exploiting Canady and violating Canady’s right to medical privacy.

After the police confiscated Schultz’s equipment, Canady gave Schultz his phone number and asked him to call him, which according to Schultz only further angered VA officials at the event.

Canady gave a different account of the incident than the VA when Schultz’s report aired today.

“It makes me mad, because I’m grown, and I’ll talk to whoever I want to. You know what I mean? And it makes me feel like you have something to hide. That you’re worried that something might get out that you don’t want to get out. I think it’s un-American. I really do.”

One VA official told Schultz he would not be prosecuted if he voluntarily left the public event. Which sounds a lot like a threat to prosecute him if he stayed. The VA still hasn’t returned Schultz’s equipment.

….on faith and the American founding.

I have a piece at Reason today looking at new research and the renewed debate over eyewitness testimony.

I know there’s a “crack” joke in here somewhere.

Cole was wrongly convicted of rape more than 20 years ago.

Though a repeat rapist confessed to the crime in 1995, prosecutors refused to reopen Cole’s case. He died in 1999, his family says due to his inability to get proper treatment for his asthma while he was incarcerated.

Cole was formally vindicated yesterday, 10 years after his death.

Iowa Rep. Steve King, on his opposition to gay marriage:

…it sucks me into the Iowa policy in a way that I haven’t been sucked into it in a while…

My gay friends tell me Craigslist is good for that. Not to be confused with King’s fellow gay marriage opponent Larry Craig’s list, of course. Although there might be some overlap.

Tim Carney explains.

Amusing little story: A few years ago while I was working at Cato, Robert Levy wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times in opposition to giving the FDA the power to regulate tobacco. A board member from the American Cancer Society wrote a letter to the editor in response pointing out that Phillip Morris at the time gave money to Cato, ergo Levy’s op-ed should be taken as little more than the latest example of a free market think tank serving its corporate paymasters.

Except, as noted, Philip Morris supports FDA regulation of tobacco, and has for some time. In fact, it’s usually a safe bet that big business is going to come down in favor of, not against, whatever hot new regulation is being touted by the nation’s editorial boards. Because they can probably afford to comply with it. And it will make it more difficult for upstart competitors to get into the game.

How I’d rank ‘em tonight:

Cato’s Sallie James reports that U.K.-based PartyGaming has settled with the U.S. Department of Justice. For a $105 million “fee,” DOJ will drop its case against the site for allowing U.S. users to gamble online prior to the passage of the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act.

James calls this “semi-good news.” I’m having a hard time conjuring even that much optimism. A foreign company and its executives, operating out of a country where everything the company was doing was legal, was being prosecuted in the U.S. for violating an ambiguous law the Justice Department was using to  paternalistically prohibit Americans from consensually wagering online. Now in exchange for agreeing to stop doing business with Americans and paying a $105 million fine, the U.S. government has graciously agreed not to throw the company’s executives in prison.

Whether you’re scoring in terms of individual freedom, free trade, common sense, or the rule of law, it seems like a net loss all around to me.

This one:

Flamboyant financier ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford expects to be indicted by a federal grand jury in the next two weeks, he told ABC News in an interview in which he cried, denied wrongdoing and threatened to punch his questioner in the mouth.

Keep an eye on this one. I could be wrong, but it certainly sets off some red flags.

First, according to the report, they brought in the SWAT team after “evidence was presented to a local justice of the peace that the residents were in possession of marijuana.” That’s possession, not distribution.

Second, according to a police spokesman, “As soon as they opened the door and announced they were the police they were fired upon.” That would seem to indicate this was a no-knock raid. For possession of marijuana.

Third, the police haven’t yet announced if they’ve found any drugs. That doesn’t mean they didn’t. But generally speaking, if they do find drugs in a raid ends in violence, they’re quick to point that out—particularly if it’s a large quantity.

Guess we’ll see. It’s possible that this report has left out some details.

Of course, even if they found pot, it doesn’t justify the tactics. It’s hard to believe someone guilty only of possessing pot would knowingly exchange gunfire with police. Note too that the police felt compelled to visit neighbors to be sure no bullets penetrated the walls of the apartment complex to strike anyone. All of that for a consensual crime.

MORE: A commenter says that “one of the TV stations reported they have been charge with felony possession.”

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a rogue narcotics unit within the Philadelphia police department that was terrorizing grocery stores owned by immigrants. All of the raided store owners told a similar story: The unit raided under the pretense that the stores were selling small plastic bags commonly used by drug dealers to package narcotics. The cops then disconnected the stores’ security cameras. Once the cameras were disconnected, they then looted the stores of snack food, cigarettes, and cash. According to store owners, the official police reports often underreported the amount of cashed seized from the stores.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has since published accounts of more raids. And the Philadelphia Daily News has posted video from one of the raids (embed doesn’t seem to be working, but you can watch at the link, or read the transcript here). The officers seem particularly concerned about whether the video from the cameras can be viewed outside the store, and where the video is stored. In the story from last month, at least one store owner told the Daily News that the police returned to his store in a second raid solely to confiscate the computer that hosted the video of them disconnecting the video cameras during the first raid. These cops obviously didn’t want a video record of what they were doing, at least one they couldn’t confiscate.

According to press accounts, the warrants weren’t obtained to search for actual illicit drugs, but merely for the open sale of plastic zip-lock bags, which aren’t illegal by themselves, and have perfectly legitimate uses. It’s a ridiculous law that requires mind reading on the part of investigators—the bags become illegal to sell only once the merchant suspects his customer might use them for illegal purposes. (It’s the same odd concept of criminality that led to the bizarre arrests of several dozen Indian convenience store workers in Georgia in 2005.)

Meanwhile, the head of this particular narcotics unit, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik, is coming under fire in other cases, too. One of his longtime informants has come forward to say Cujdik routinely lied on warrant affidavits and police reports, including describing controlled drug buys that never happened. One of those cases resulted in a botched raid on Lady Gonzalez, who alleges one of Cujdik’s officers sexually assaulted her during the raid.

Cujdik has since been stripped of his gun and badge, but he remains on paid desk duty.

The TSA has responded on its blog to last week’s story about the detainment of Steve Bierfeldt, a staffer for Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty organization, at a St. Louis airport. Bierfeldt recorded his interaction with TSA agents and police officers while he was detained, which was apparently for not giving a satisfactory explanation why he was carrying $4,700 in cash. The TSA’s response:

At approximately 6:50 p.m. on March 29, 2009, a metal box alarmed the X-ray machine at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, triggering the need for additional screening. Because the box contained a number of items including a large amount of cash, all of which needed to be removed to be properly screened, it was deemed more appropriate to continue the screening process in a private area. A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employee and members of the St. Louis Airport Police Department can be heard on the audio recording. The tone and language used by the TSA employee was inappropriate. TSA holds its employees to the highest professional standards. TSA will continue to investigate this matter and take appropriate action.

Movements of large amounts of cash through the checkpoint may be investigated by law enforcement authorities if criminal activity is suspected. As a general rule, passengers are required to cooperate with the screening process. Cooperation may involve answering questions about their property, including why they are carrying a large sum of cash. A passenger who refuses to answer questions may be referred to appropriate authorities for further inquiry.

The response raises a number of questions. How does carrying a large amount of cash impair the safety of air travel? Weapons I could see. But cash?

Also, merely carrying even large sums of cash is not enough in itself for someone to be legally detained. There needs to be some other sign of illegal activity. What else about Bierfeldt made the TSA agents suspect him of criminal activity? What is the minimum amount of cash you can carry in an airport without being expected to explain to TSA agents why you’re carrying it?

Will the public be told what disciplinary action is taken against the agents who acted inappropriately? Will Bierfeldt?

From a policy standpoint, it also seems like a bad idea for the agency charged with ensuring the safety of airline passengers to distract itself by policing for crimes unrelated to airline safety, too. Of course, in this case, the only “crime” was an airline passenger carrying a large amount of cash, and asking the screeners to tell him what law compells him to answer their questions.

Over the weekend, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Steven Hayne and Michael West. This part of the story is interesting:

The lawsuits filed in February represent only one side of the legal argument. Plaintiffs’ attorney Rob McDuff of Jackson said Friday he’s still waiting for a response from West.

“It took a while to serve them with the papers because it was hard to track down West,” McDuff said.

Attorney Robin Roberts of Hattiesburg, who has represented West in other cases, said he had not seen West, whose dentist office is now closed, in at least a year.

In cases just two years apart, Brooks and Brewer were each convicted of raping and murdering the young daughters of their girlfriends, almost entirely due to the bite mark testimony Hayne and West gave at trial.

Between them, the two men served more than 30 years in prison. Brewer spent most of his time on death row. Both were released last year after a check of the state’s DNA database matched a man named Justin Albert Johnson. Johnson then confessed to both crimes.

Archive of my prior reporting on Hayne and West here.

If I were a movie reviewer, I think I’d probably spend some of my alone time, say in the shower or on the treadmill, trying to think up witty ways of describing the next really, really horrible movie I might get the opporutunity to review. But I’ve always wondered, how do movie critics know when to roll out their A-stuff? Because there’s always the chance someone will make a worse movie. Seems like you might worry about running out of superlatives (or whatever the opposite of “superlatives” is).

For example, let’s say you’re Roger Ebert. And when the movie Battlefield Earth came out, you (justifiably) wrote:

“Battlefield Earth” is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way…

I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.

What then, is left to say about this movie, out this month?

Someone sent me this video after my post on Andy Richter coming back to late night.

From Hillary Clinton to Diane Feinstein to Bob Schieffer to the New York Times, gun control proponents keep repeating the claim that 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico’s drug war were sold in the United States.

William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott say it just isn’t true. As it turns out, the 90 percent statistic actually concerns only those guns Mexican authorities sent to the U.S. for tracing. Since the U.S. really has no means of tracing guns not manufactured in the U.S., Mexican authorities don’t bother sending U.S. officials guns that were obviously manufactured elsewhere (generally guns that lack a U.S. serial number, or don’t show signs of once having had one).  So the 90 percent figure isn’t surprising, and it isn’t really alarming. It means that 90 percent of the guns Mexican authorities thought were probably made and sold in the U.S. were indeed made and sold in the U.S.

But that’s not what gun control proponents have been saying.  They’ve been saying nine of 10 guns used in all Mexican drug crimes came from the U.S. That number, La Jeunesse and Lott report, is closer to 17 percent.

The report explains that most of the weapons used by Mexico’s drug cartels are actually illegal in the U.S. Even if they weren’t, it makes little sense to suggest drug cartels are going through the hassle of sending thousands of “straw buyers” across the border to legally purchase guns in America when more powerful black market weapons are available from Russia, South America, China, and Guatemala without the bureaucracy and risk of registration. The L.A. Times hinted at as much in an article a couple of weeks ago, but seemed to miss the obvious connection that if the cartels are arming up with black market weapons unavailable in the U.S., the 90 percent figure trumpeted by U.S. politicians probably isn’t correct.

Here’s the other thing: According to one Mexican official, 150,000 Mexican soldiers have defected in the last year, taking their government-issued M-16s with them. Those guns are ending up in the hands of drug dealers. The U.S. is also continually sending more money and arms to Mexico to support President Calderon’s military crackdown on the drug trade, but we send all of that aid knowing the high rate of defection among both soldiers and Mexican police officers, and the high rate of corruption and high percentage of Mexican officials on the cartels’ payrolls. One firearms expert told LaJeunesse and Lott that some guns…

“…are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way — the fully auto versions — they are not smuggled in across the river.”

In other words, not only are U.S. politicians flat wrong when they say that 90 percent of the guns used in Mexico’s drug war are coming from U.S. gun dealers recklessly selling legal American guns to cartel straw buyers, they’re ignoring the fact that a not-insignificant number of the guns used by the cartels likely came from the U.S. government, in the form of the drug war aid.

Yet the federal government’s strategy, as outlined by Hillary Clinton last week, is apparently to harass legitimate U.S. gun dealers while sending more weapons and money to the Mexican government. More power for the government, less freedom for the citizenry. Seems about consistent with politicians’ solution to most problems.

Good thing we sacrificed a trillion dollars and the lives 4,000+ U.S. troops to create such a shining beacon of Middle Eastern democracy, huh?

UPDATE: The State Department is refuting the story.

Via Johnathan Blanks, nerdy and awesome con law humor.