I’m thrilled to give you, Agitator readers, the chance to pick the brain of America’s most high-profile libertarian, 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel.  John will take your questions this Thursday at 7:30 pm in a live chat at the site you’re reading.

He’ll also be promoting his new blog, as well as his upcoming 20/20 report on the health care debate.

John was gracious enough to give us some of his time, so let’s give him a good turnout.

Here’s one from Montgomery County, Maryland:

Kenyan immigrant Nancy Njoroge had been living in the United States for a year when a Montgomery County SWAT team burst into her Gaithersburg apartment at 4 a.m., handcuffed her and her two teenage daughters, and searched her apartment, court records show.

Police found nothing.

The reason: Njoroge lived in No. 202 of her apartment complex. The police had a search warrant for apartment 201.

After rejecting an offer from the county’s claims adjuster of a “couple of movie passes,” the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the county on the family’s behalf for unspecified damages, according to ACLU records filed in court.

The ACLU said the purpose of the lawsuit was to hold the police department accountable for its mistake.

“Officers had but one apartment to locate, in a quiet and well-lit hallway in the dead of night, without distraction and with clearly marked doors and numbers,” ACLU lawyer Fritz Mulhauser said in a letter to the county…

Court records don’t give a clear reason why the police raided the wrong apartment, and the county attorney assigned to the case did not respond to inquiries for the story. But in court records, a SWAT team leader indicated that it was an isolated incident.

The movie passes were a nice touch. The raid actually happened in 2005, but after negotiations with the county failed, the family filed its federal civil rights suit this month.

Public library, Philadelphia.

In Indianapolis:

Marye Minton, 70, and her 72-year-old husband were awoken early Thursday to officers banging on the door of their home…

Marye Minton said she is upset that the officers came inside and ordered her husband, who is in poor health, onto the ground.

“They said to him, ‘Get on the floor,’ like that, and see my husband’s had four strokes, and he can’t whoop anybody, he can’t do anything,” she said. “I’m very mad and I don’t want it to happen to another citizen.”

Officers were trying to serve a warrant for a man wanted on drug charges. The address listed on the paperwork was 4042. The Minton’s home is 4048, with both house numbers clearly marked.

But Major Mark Robinett of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, who is in charge of warrant sweeps, said he was told that officers had a difficult time reading the addresses because of overcast skies.

McClatchy summarizes the long list of policies where President Obama has reneged on campaign promises—either in letter or spirit—and adopted the policies of his predecessor. We’ve covered many of them here, but they range from a broad application of the state secrets doctrine to invocations of executive privilege to the Defense of Marriage Act to a host of other issues related to transparency and disclosure.

My own hunch is that presidents try to keep campaign promises that expand the government and their own power, and either back down from or are unwilling to expend much capital on promises that make government smaller and more accountable, thus limiting their own power.

Looking over PolitiFact’s report card on Obama’s campaign promises, that seems to be about right thus far. By my count (and some of this is certainly subjective) of the of the 31 promises the site says Obama has kept thus far, 20 in some way grow or expand the federal government. Just six make the government smaller, more transparent, or more accountable. The remaining five have no effect, or amount to a wash.

Of the six campaign promises PolitiFact says Obama has unquestionably broken, five would have limited his own power, provided tax breaks, or provided more accountability and transparency to the federal government. One was mostly symbolic (recognizing the Armenian genocide). So far, he hasn’t broken a single promise that would grow or expand the government, though he has compromised on a few, and many have been stalled.

PolitiFact also gives Obama more credit than he deserves on some promises. For example, Obama’s promise that “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” was broken when he signed a bill raising taxes on cigarettes to pay for an expansion of the SCHIP program. PolitiFact calls this a “compromise.” But “not any of your taxes” seems pretty clear. Obama didn’t say, “not any of your taxes, so long as you don’t smoke” or “so long as you don’t have habits the government finds distasteful.”

In short, I think it’s safe to say that Obama has been willing to spend plenty of political capital on his promises that vastly expand the size and scope of the federal government, and relatively little on promises related to eliminating waste, putting limits on his own power, or making the government more transparent and accountable.

It’s worth emphasizing that this analysis isn’t holding Obama to some libertarian standard of the ideal president—I’m not looking at how many of his total policies grow government versus how many limit it or hold it accountable. It’s holding him up against his own campaign promises. That is, even when you assume the positions of left-of-center, big government Obama-the-candidate as your baseline, Obama-the-president comes up short.

I’m with James Joyner. The right-wing blogs’ drummed-up outrage over Obama going to get some ice cream with his kids as the Iranian government cracked down on protesters yesterday has to be about the dumbest thing since . . . well, since the last time the right-wing blogs drummed up some silly outrage.

There’s violence and suffering going on all over the world, all of the time. Is the guy never supposed to take his kids for ice cream, lest he appear indifferent to it all? And where were the howls of right-wing outrage when Bush was clearing brush in Crawford during various world crises? Also, isn’t taking some time off the job to spend time with your kids something right-wingers generally celebrate?

I do agree that the media fawns over Obama. And while I admire the guy for being normal enough to make the occasional burger or ice cream run, the press doesn’t need to cover it every time he does. But juxtaposing Obama’s ice cream cone next to the woman shot by the Basiji is quite a bit worse than ignoring the protests to go get ice cream, it’s exploiting the deaths of the protesters to score cheap, partisan political points.

There are legitimate reasons to be outraged about Obama’s first several months. This is just foolish.

Yesterday, the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department announced that its internal review found that its officers did nothing wrong in the SWAT raid on Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home.

Last summer, officers intercepted a package of marijuana at a delivery service warehouse. Despite the fact that they already knew of a drug distribution network in which dealers were sending packages of marijuana to random addresses with the intent of having them picked up by accomplices working for the delivery companies, the Sheriff’s Department raided Calvo’s just seconds after his mother-in-law brought the package into the house with no investigation into who actually lived there.

Police and county officials have since admitted that Calvo and his family are innocent. But they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoing, such as not doing the least bit of investigation before sending the SWAT team to take down Calvo’s door, not knocking and announcing before entering, or slaughtering Calvo’s two Labrador retrievers.

In fact, Prince George’s County officials have been stunningly callous about it all, at various points praising the officers for their “restraint,” and commenting that everyone involved in the investigation and raid “deserves a pat on the back.”

So the announcement yesterday that the internal review cleared the department isn’t surprising. But Sheriff Michael Jackson’s comments at the accompanying press conference are really something to behold. From the Washington Post:

The findings of the internal review “are consistent with what I’ve felt all along: My deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities”…

In an interview, Jackson reiterated his explanation that a scream by Calvo’s mother-in-law, Georgia Porter, who saw officers in SWAT gear running toward the house, justified the shooting.

Porter “corroborated that she did scream out ‘SWAT.’ She admitted to that, and [Calvo] admitted to hearing that upstairs in the house,” Jackson said. “That threw out the procedure of knocking and announcing, because now [officers were] compromised.”

One dog was shot four times by the front door. Calvo has said his younger dog was running away from officers when it was shot twice, including once in a hind leg. Jackson said deputies thought the dog was running toward another deputy in the home…

“I’m sorry for the loss of their family pets,” Jackson said. “But this is the unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community. Lost in this whole incident was the criminal element. . . . In the sense that we kept these drugs from reaching our streets, this operation was a success.”

First of all, the police intercepted the package at the warehouse. At that point, they had already kept the marijuana inside from “reaching the streets.” Everything that happened next was at the discretion of the officers who carried out the investigation and raid well after the marijuana had already been confiscated, which means they and they alone own the results of the raid.

Second, what happened to Calvo isn’t the “unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community,” it’s the result of a bumbling, overly aggressive, wholly incompetent police department. And it’s the result of a drug warrior mentality that believes invading someone’s home with guns and filling their pets with bullets is an appopriate response to a possible violation of state marijuana laws. The raiding cops didn’t bother to notify the Berwyn Heights police chief before sending in the SWAT team, which would almost certainly have tipped them off to their mistake. They didn’t bother to do any investigation at all of who lived at Calvo’s residence. Their first resort was to use the most overwhelming force possible.

Third, the purpose of a knock-and-announce requirement is to notify a home’s occupants that the police are outside to serve a warrant, and to give them the opportunity to come to the door and prevent the use of force and violence. Jackson’s excuse that officers feared Calvo’s mother-in-law’s scream when she saw men in black running up the lawn tipped off the drug dealers inside doesn’t fly. Because, again, the entire point of the knock-and-announce requirement is to “tip off” occupants that the police are outside.

Finally, Jackson’s comment that “[m]y deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities” may actually be the only accurate thing he said yesterday. Just not in the way he intended.

Andrew Sullivan has some pretty amazing coverage of the last 24 hours.

I just watched the video on YouTube of the female protester who was shot in the heart. Crushing. Terrifying. Brought tears to my eyes. But thank goodness it was captured and posted.

We may never know with 100 percent certainty whether the election was fixed, though it sure seems that way. But one thing we sure as hell know now, the Iranian government’s reaction to those protesting the results has shown it to be wholly and morally illegitimate.

Government has been murdering its own citizens for as long as we’ve had government, particularly when the people begin to pose a threat to those in power. The difference is that now, the entire world is watching. Iran’s brutality is on display for everyone to see, archived for history, in a way that we didn’t have even in Tiananmen, and haven’t had for most of human history. That, at least, is progress.

A market in the San Telmo neighborhood, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup last night. We had a nice turnout of about a dozen people. I also learned this morning what a high-altitude hangover feels like (hint: it’s less pleasant than a normal-altitude hangover).

I just taped a segment on the Nanny State for a Denver PBS program hosted by the Independence Institute. I’m giving a speech this afternoon, then will enjoy cigars and booze tonight, and shooting tomorrow, as part of the Institute’s annual “Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms Party.”

In part four, I talk about my reporting on Dr. Hayne and West and the problems with the forensics system.

In part five, I suggest five ways to reform the criminal justice system.

Two bear cubs, Denali National Park, Alaska.

My flight has been delayed. I should get into Denver at around 6pm, so by the time I get into the city, check in, and unpack, I may not be able to get to the meet up until about 7:30.

Feel free to get started without me, though!

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors aren’t obligated to turn over DNA for testing after someone has been convicted, even if the state acknowledges that a DNA test would prove conclusive as to guilt or innocence, and even if the defendant agrees to pay for the testing himself.

Representing the convicted man, the Innocence Project argued that a right to access a simple test that could establish actual innocence would be covered by the Constitution’s due process clause.

I wrote about the case, District Attorney’s Office for the Third Judicial District v. Osborne, for The Daily Beast last March.

MORE: I’m troubled by how many people say “I don’t see how you can read a right to DNA testing into the Constitution.” The Constitution isn’t an exhaustive list of your rights. It’s a document that delegates powers to the federal government, and through the Fourteenth Amendment, prevents some states from violating certain rights. One of those is the due process rights of each state’s citizens. If “due process” means anything, I would think it would mean the right of an innocent person to access evidence so he can perform a simple test to prove he isn’t guilty. Yes, the facts of this specific case were unfortunate. It wasn’t the ideal test case. That doesn’t make the ruling any less troubling.

I’m traveling, so I haven’t had time to read the opinion thoroughly, but at first blush it would seem that after Osborne, a state legislature that just realized some serious flaws in its criminal justice system and sees possible exonerations and lawsuits coming down the pike could simply pass a law making it difficult or impossible to obtain DNA evidence post-conviction, and head the looming crisis off at the pass. Seems to me this decision puts a heck of a lot of faith in the political process to keep something like that from happening. And we’ve all seen how good the political process in say, Mississippi, has been at making sure its courts are delivering justice, and not merely convictions.

MORE II: Steve Verdon has a more thorough analysis.

So let’s go ahead and set plans tonight for Randolph’s in the Warwick Hotel at 1776 Grant Street.

I’ll be there starting at around 6:30 pm local time.

Hope to see many of you there.

Today’s installment looks at the problems no-knock and forced-entry raids.

Part I is here.

Part II is here.

The Majestic, Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.

The Boston Globe has been doing some terrific reporting about how small town police departments in Massachusetts have been using the Pentagon’s surplus weapons program to acquire some ridiculously high-powered weaponry. The paper found that 82 police departments across the state have obtained more than 1,000 military-grade weapons over the last 15 years, including…

Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles. At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers.

In response, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has temporarily suspended the program to investigate.

The thing is, just about any decent-sized newspaper in the country could do a similar investigation. This has been going on since the early 1990s. The program was streamlined in 1997 when Congress created an agency called the Law Enforcement Support Program to facilitate the giveaways.  National Journal reported in 2000 that between 1997 and 1999 alone, the office handled 3.4 million orders for military equipment from 11,000 domestic police agencies, and gave away $727 million worth of stuff designed for use in war to be used in American streets and neighborhoods, against American citizens. That included…

"…253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger airplanes, and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles."

The transfers have only picked up since then. The program is also how Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott acquired his M113A1 armored personnel carrier, which moves on tank-like tracks, and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds. And he isn’t the only one.

If I may, here’s a passage about the program from Overkill, the 2006 paper on police militarization that I wrote for the Cato Institute:

The city of St. Petersburg, Florida, bought an armored personnel carrier from the Pentagon for just $1,000. The seven police officers of Jasper, Florida—which has all of 2,000 people and hasn’t had a murder in 14 years—were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.” The sheriff’s office in landlocked Boone County, Indiana, was given an amphibious  armored personnel carrier...

The New York Times reported in 1999 that the Fresno, California, SWAT team had two helicopters with night-vision goggles and heat sensors, a turret-armed armored personnel carrier, and an armored van…

A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted."

In a 1997 60 Minutes segment on the trend toward militarization, the CBS news magazine profiled the Sheriff’s Department of Marion County, Florida, a rural, agricultural area known for its horse farms. Courtesy of the various Pentagon giveaway programs, the county sheriff proudly showed reporter Lesley Stahl the department’s 23 military helicopters, two C-12 luxury executive aircraft …a motor home, several trucks and trailers, a tank, and a “bomb robot.” This, in addition to an arsenal of military-grade assault weapons.

As you can see, there was some media interest in this story about 10 years ago, but it largely died down, particularly after September 11. But the transfers didn’t stop, and neither did the unfortunate trend toward a militaristic mindset that comes with domestic police officers using military equipment and tactics, and being told they’re fighting a "war."

It’s good to see the Globe to revisit this issue, and it’s great that the paper’s investigation seems to have won the attention of Massacusetts’ elected officials. It would be even better if it could attract the attention of some members of Congress, who might stop this ill-considered program once and for all.

…the U.S. government is going to charge foreign travelers $10 per visit in order to . . . fund a campaign urging foreigners to travel to the U.S.

And this is all because tourism is down, due all the money we’ve spent on post 9-11 efforts to make it more difficult for foreigners to come here.

Can’t wait until these people are in charge of health care!