Mary Beth Buchanan’s expensive, high-profile, politically-loaded pursuit of Pittsburgh-area medical examiner Cyril Wecht has finally come to an end.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says it’s time for her career to do the same.

When it finally came time to acknowledge the inevitable and seek to dismiss the charges, the U.S. attorney couldn’t resist taking one last stab at vindication, saying of Dr. Wecht, “He wasn’t acquitted of anything. It was a hung jury. However, in our society, everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”

Indeed. And as Ms. Buchanan spectacularly failed to prove Dr. Wecht’s guilt, that last insinuation of guilt was inappropriate. It is time for Ms. Buchanan to take responsibility for her failure and resign before President Barack Obama asks for her resignation, which he could not now be blamed for doing.

If President Obama is reluctant to pursue any sort of sanctions against the people who politicized the Justice Department for fear of appearing vindictive, he should at least take the time to review possible incidences of wrongful prosecution by the Bush administration’s more bloodthirsty U.S. attorneys.

He could start with Buchanan and the case of Dr. Bernard Rottschaefer.

Conservatives Warn Quick Sex Change Only Barrier Between Gays, Marriage

“Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Two-and-a-half minutes of lyrical fury.

Waterfront bar in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

As I noted earlier, Cory Maye’s hearing before the Mississippi Court of Appeals took place earlier this afternoon.

I’m obviously biased, but I thought Maye attorneys Abe Pafford and Ben Vernia were outstanding. I don’t have a transcript in front of me, and the video isn’t archived yet, so I’m not going to do a point-by-point rundown, though you can get a pretty good idea of what transpired by reading the briefs.

The state’s attorney looked harried and unprepared, with one of the judges even jumping in at one point to mention case law favorable to her argument. The judges seemed particularly skeptical of the state’s response to Maye’s argument that he should have been permitted to move the trial back to Jefferson Davis County, where the raid took place, instead of in Lamar County, where the trial was eventually held.

Best I could tell, one judge seemed particularly favorable to Maye’s case, and one seemed particularly hostile. The third judge was harder to read. I couldn’t really see his body language through the web stream.

I guess we’ll find out in the next few months.

The blood-boiling story of the day comes from San Francisco:

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It’s a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month’s rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

It just gets worse from there.

• The city bureaucrat who clamped down on Moore did so after reading about his success in the newspaper.

• A spokesman for the city’s Department of Public Works described the city’s interaction with Moore as an “educational” experience for Moore.

• The city official wouldn’t tell Moore what building he needed to visit to get the permit, because she didn’t know.

• When Moore was able to collect the money (which included donations from his outraged customers), got the right forms, and found the right office, they wouldn’t take his money, because he didn’t have a government-issued photo ID.

Moore is going to be okay, thanks to the generosity of the private citizens who have rallied around him. He now has enough money for the permit and his first month’s rent, and he has the counsel of an attorney who is helping him navigate the city’s maze of regulations free of charge. But it’s certainly no thanks to San Francisco’s famously progressive, pro-homeless city government.

The NY Times columnist was the paper’s bureau chief in Beijing 20 years ago, and was in the crowd when Chinese troops began the slaughter. He looks back in his column today:

Troops had already opened fire on an ambulance that had tried to collect the injured, so other ambulances kept their distance. Finally, some unlikely saviors emerged — the rickshaw drivers.

These were peasants and workers who made a living pedaling bicycle rickshaws, carrying passengers or freight around Beijing. It was those rickshaw drivers who slowly pedaled out toward the troops to collect the bodies of the dead and injured. Then they raced back to us, legs straining furiously, rushing toward the nearest hospital.

One stocky rickshaw driver had tears streaming down his cheeks as he drove past me to display a badly wounded student so that I could photograph or recount the incident. That driver perhaps couldn’t have defined democracy, but he had risked his life to try to advance it.

That was happening all over Beijing. On the old airport road that same night, truckloads of troops were entering the city from the east. A middle-aged bus driver saw them and quickly blocked the road with his bus.

Move aside, the troops shouted.

I won’t let you attack the students, the bus driver retorted defiantly.

The troops pointed their guns at the bus driver and ordered him to move the bus aside. Instead, he plucked the keys from the ignition and hurled them into the bushes beside the road to ensure that no one could drive that bus away. The man was arrested; I don’t know what happened to him.

….all night long.

It was 20 years ago today that the Chinese government killed 2,000 to 3,000 of its own citizens for the crime of demanding their own liberty. This iconic photo is about all that’s left of them.

George Orwell said, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” He’s all too right. Last century, an estimated 262 million people were murdered by their own government . That doesn’t include the hundreds of millions more killed by opposing governments during war.

Today ought to be a day to celebrate and promote human liberty, and to remember the abuses governments have heaped upon their subjects over the centuries.

So go find your own metaphor for the government tank pictured above.

Then put yourself in front of it.

Columbus St. from the river, Chicago.

(Email me if you’re interesting in purchasing a print of this one.)

Tomorrow at 2:30pm ET, the Mississippi Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in the Cory Maye case. You’ll be able to stream the arguments live from the court’s website.

To catch you up:

– PDF of Maye’s appeal.

– My 2006 Reason article on Maye’s story.

– Archive of TheAgitator.com posts about Maye.

– Reason.tv documentary on Maye’s case:

In general, when I ask someone to do a live chat here, would you all prefer it be held during the day or in the evening?

So far, I’ve tried to schedule them either during the lunch hour (eastern time) or later in the evening.

I’m curious to know which time would make you more likely to (a) watch and read, and (b) submit a question.

Harry Reid on Sotomayor:

“I understand that during her career, she’s written hundreds and hundreds of opinions. I haven’t read a single one of them, and if I’m fortunate before we end this, I won’t have to read one of them.”

Central Indiana, taken in 2005.

Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking about the drug war at the Arlington County Library in Arlington, Virginia.

Someone before me will be defending drug prohibition. I’ll of course be opposing it.

The event starts at 7pm, and is sponsored by the Arlington Campaign for Liberty. The library is located at 1015 N. Quincy St.

Also tomorrow, I’ll be discussing various issues on FreedomWatch, Judge Andrew Napolitano’s web program for FoxNews.com.

I’m scheduled to go on at 2:30pm.

More allegations of sexual assault during drug raids conducted by members of Philadelphia Officer Jeffrey Cujdik’s rogue narcotics team.

If these were normal citizens, and not cops, they’d have been indicted by now.

Winter moonrise in mid-town D.C.

My friend Ryan Grim reports

Nicholas Kristof wants to know: Should the U.S. legalize drugs?

The influential New York Times columnist posted the question, which is being asked in mainstream circles with increasing frequency, on his Facebook page Saturday evening. Opinions have come pouring in.

“I’m thinking of writing this coming week about whether legalization of drugs makes sense. Any thoughts out there or good resources?”

If you’d like to help him out, go here.

Some of Sonia Sotomayor’s defenders are throwing out this case to counter attacks that she’s racist against white people. The case involves an NYPD cop who was fired for publicly distributing racist anti-black and anti-semitic literature.

The Second Circuit upheld the cop’s termination, but Sotomayor dissented, arguing that because the cop wasn’t high-ranking, a public spokesperson, or involved in policy making, his public advocacy of racism while off-duty was protected by the First Amendment.

Sotomayor’s defenders are right that the racism charge, which basically comes from one line pulled out of context from one of her speeches, is ridiculous. And I suppose her opinion in the case does in some way diminish the “she hates white people” talking point, though I doubt most people advancing that talking point were ever going to be persuaded otherwise.

But I have a real problem with her dissent in this case. Police officers have the power to detain, use force, and kill. I would hope police officials would factor temperament into their hiring and firing decisions, and given that Jews and black people will be among the people an NYPD officer is supposed to protect, I don’t think it’s out of bounds to exclude as NYPD cops people who openly express hatred for Jews and black people.

Sotomayor argued that this particular cop’s dissemination of racist material was mitigated by the fact that he had a mostly clerical job. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t still have the authority to stop, arrest, and detain people. Nor does it mean he couldn’t influence other officers with his opinions. And as the majority points out, there’s also no reason to think he’d never be transferred to a job that did involve more interaction with the public.

I’ll defend without reservation the First Amendment right to distribute racist literature. But I have a hard time accepting the idea that the First Amendment both protects your right to distribute that literature and hold a taxpayer-funded government job that gives you a tremendous amount of authority and control over the very people you would rather didn’t exist.

It shows how strange these nomination battles have become when you have leftists pointing to a nominee’s vote to let an openly racist cop keep his job as an argument in favor of her confirmation.

The fact that this opinion shows Sotomoyor isn’t the caricature her oppoennts make her out to be doesn’t mean it was a good opnion.

Only six percent of the public answered all 12 questions correctly.

Gives you some indication of why the state of public debate is the way it is.