Jesus, this guy is obsessive.

1) I read and re-read Patterico’s initial post several times when composing my response to it. He says I wrongly wrote that he left out a portion of his excerpt of Dunphy’s post. Apparently, I skipped over that portion several times. I’ll take his word for it. Consider this a correction. The rest of the post stands.

2) He’s declaring victory in his critique of my articles on the Jimmie Duncan case. Incorrect. I didn’t respond to his nonsense because his critiques are misleading, quote from opinions to cases that had nothing to do with Duncan’s criminal trial, and otherwise leave out information that undermines his case. This is partly because he got much of his information from summaries of the evidence in judicial opinions (including dissenting opinions) and not from the actual trial transcript (odd, because he has (wrongly) criticized me for doing the same thing in the past). His critique of the second article basically amounted to dismissing my reporting of police-coerced testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, and the withholding of exculpatory evidence as “pro-defense spin.”

It would take a many-thousand word blog post to explain what’s wrong with his critiques, after which I’m sure he’d respond with another many-thousand word post. I don’t have the time or the interest in getting into that. If he wants to consider my reluctance to engage in an exchange of pedantics to be a grand victory for him, let him.

3) I blocked Patterico from reading my Twitter feed because he has a strange obsession with me. My Twitter feed is where, in addition to linking to my other work or the occasional news story, I write about my dogs, or complain about the WiFi at whatever airport I’m at, or write about a delicious dinner I just ate at some restaurant. When he tried to subscribe to it, I didn’t see a reason why a guy who clearly hates me would or should have any interest in what I’m eating for dinner. Nor did I really feel like reading a blog post in which he meticulously explains why what I ate couldn’t possibly have been as delicious as I described it on Twitter, calls me a liar, and demands a retraction. I’m exaggerating, but only a little. In the past, Patterico has referenced a blog post I once put up about an event in my personal life to try to delve into my psychology to explain why I have the opinions I do.

So I really didn’t feel like having the guy use old Twitter posts in some future attack on me. I figured if Patterico wants to see what I’m writing about politics or news events, or what I’m reporting, he can read my blog. So I blocked him. This was many months ago. That he has saved up my blocking of him all this time to now throw up with a giant graphic and expose! at the top of his latest blog post is weird. That he found a way to get around the block and is reading my feed anyway is, again, obsessive and creepy.

4) I haven’t responded to point (1) because in the last 36 hours, I’ve been working on a breaking story, had a lunch appointment, had a drink with a friend, and for the last 12 hours have had a massive migraine. Henceforth, I’ll try to be more comprehensive out my daily routine in my Twitter feed so Patterico can keep track.

5) You’d think I’d have learned by now that responding to this guy in any way invites hours of wasted time delving into tedious parsing, rehashing months- or years-old debates, and responding to personal attacks. And, apparently now, discussion of my Twitter feed. Lesson (finally) learned. This idiot doesn’t merit a response. If one of his inevitable future attacks on me includes allegations meritorious enough that a blogger or commentator I respect picks up and reposts, I’ll respond. Otherwise, it’s just not worth it. I’m sure Patterico will respond to this post, and will then take my failure to respond to that response as a concession of defeat. And I will let him.

6) Because of aforementioned migraine, I won’t be blogging any more today. Consider this an open thread.

…because I have a deadline today, and way too many browser tabs open.

Unbelievable. Well, okay. Totally believable.

The Democratic-controlled House is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in response to defense industry pressures and campaign contributions under an approach he has decried as “business as usual” and vowed to help end.

The unwanted equipment in a military spending bill expected to come to a vote on the House floor Thursday or Friday has a price tag of at least $6.9 billion…

Roughly $2.75 billion of the extra funds — all of which were unanimously approved in an 18-minute markup Monday by the House Appropriations Committee — would finance “earmarks,” or projects demanded by individual lawmakers that the Pentagon did not request. About half of that amount reflects spending requested by private firms, including 95 companies or related political action committees that donated a total of $789,190 in the past 2 1/2 years to members of the appropriations subcommittee on defense, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a government-spending critic who has long campaigned against such earmarks, has said he will try again Thursday to strike all such spending. But his prior earmark-stripping efforts have succeeded only once in dozens of attempts, and never on defense spending.

“Simply put, Members of Congress should not have the ability to award no-bid contracts” to private firms, Flake said in a statement explaining the 540 proposed amendments he plans to bring up. “The practice has created an ethical cloud over Congress, and it needs to end.” He noted that at least 70 of the earmarks are for former clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying firm close to appropriations subcommittee head John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) that is now being probed by the Justice Department and the House ethics committee.

Every Democrat who ever muttered a word of criticism (justified criticism, in my opinion) about the Bush administration’s no-bid contracts to Haliburton ought to be condemned if they vote to allow this crap to pass. And yes, Republcians did the same thing when they controlled Congress. Trent Lott especially was famous for funding massive military projects in Mississippi that the military didn’t want.

A Virginia woman has been arrested for blogging about the members of a local drug task force. The charge is harassment of a police officer. She apparently posted on the blog one officer’s home address, as well as photos of all members of the task force, and a photo of one officer getting into his unmarked car in front of his home.

Most readers of this site oppose the drug war. Set that aside for a moment. Assume instead that these officers were investigating organized crime, or a terror cell. What do you think of this woman’s arrest? Photographing, writing about, and criticizing police officers, even by name, should of course be legal. But it’s a tougher call when the officers in question work undercover. Naming them, posting their photos, posting their addresses, are all pretty clearly efforts to intimidate them, and it isn’t difficult to see how doing so not only makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs, but may well endanger their lives.

The woman says all of the information on her blog was publicly available. If that’s the case, and all she did was aggregate already available information, I’m inclined to think she shouldn’t have been arrested.

It doesn’t look like the woman was accusing these officers of any misconduct. She appears to have been merely goading them. That of course makes her less sympathetic, though I don’t think it would or should have much effect on whether or not her arrest was constitutional.  The charge for which she was arrested seems like it could just as easily be applied to someone who publicly criticizes or alleges misconduct against an undercover officer by name. That can’t be illegal. And I don’t know that you can really make a distinction under the law.

The LAPD officer who writes under the pseudonym Jack Dunphy and blogger and prosecutor Patterico have each put up posts taking issue with my Reason colleague Brian Doherty’s and my criticism of one of Dunphy’s posts at National Review Online. Doherty and I both summarized Dunphy’s post to say that Dunphy believes the lesson from the Henry Louis Gates affair is that anyone who asserts his constitutional rights when confronted by a cop risks being shot. Patterico and Dunphy both say Doherty and I misread Dunphy.

If Dunphy didn’t intend for that to be the point of the post, he should retract it. Because it’s difficult to interpret it any other way. Here is the meat of Dunphy’s post:

And now we are told, in a further attempt at damage control, that the Gates arrest can serve to educate all those mouth-breathing cops out there who may yet stumble into an unpleasant encounter with some other Ivy Leaguer. It’s our hope, said Gibbs, invoking that insufferable locution that one hopes will soon fade from common usage, that the Gates arrest can be “part of a teachable moment.”

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.

Emphasis mine. Patterico and Dunphy argue that Dunphy’s “lesson” here applies only to the specifics of his hypothetical—that the only time he meant to imply that you risk getting shot for asserting your rights is in the limited circumstance that an officer is looking for an armed, dangerous felon, and you happen to fit the very specific description of said felon given to police. I can’t speak for Doherty, but I stand by my original characterization of Dunphy’s post, for several reasons.

First, if this was Dunphy’s point, it’s unclear why he would invoke it in response to the Gates case, where there was no armed robbery, no getaway car, and no specific description of any unusual characteristics. Either he meant for his “lesson” to be applied more broadly, or his entire post was a red herring.

Second, as emphasized in the excerpt above (a portion that Patterico neglected to include in his post*) Dunphy explicitly sets up the hypothetical by stating that its lesson should be taken to heart by “anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer.” In other words, not just people driving 1932 Hupmobiles.

Third, Dunphy was responding negatively to the idea that the “teachable moment” in all of this ought to be for the police to be more cognizant of our rights, and not make rash arrests or employ racial profiling (we now know of course that the latter most likely didn’t play a role in the Gates arrest). Dunphy’s counter to that sentiment clearly seems to be that if there’s a lesson in the Gates arrest, it isn’t for cops, it’s for everyone else, and the lesson is to avoid “running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression” when you’ve been confronted by a police officer. Again, to say that Dunphy only intended for that lesson to apply in the very limited scenario in his hypothetical would completely ignore the hypothetical’s setup, as well as the national discussion that inspired him to put it up in the first place.

Fourth, even within Dunphy’s hypothetical, the innocent driver of the Hupmobile has no idea why he has been pulled over. He doesn’t know about the armed robbery, or that the getaway car resembles his own car. This is precisely Dunphy’s point. He’s arguing that you can’t possibly know what’s going on in a police officer’s head when he stops you or confronts you. You can’t know what circumstances led him to stop you. So you’d best just shut up and submit, even he asks you to do something that you aren’t obligated to do under the Constitution. Dunphy’s using his unlikely hypothetical to plant the threat that any noncompliance with an officer’s demands may end with him shooting you. Put another way, because you can’t possibly know the reasons why the officer has stopped you, giving lip about your rights may well endanger your life.

Finally, I’d add that I, Doherty, and L.A. Times editor Paul Thornton (also mentioned in Patterico’s post) were hardly the only ones who interpreted Dunphy’s post this way. Dunphy wrote something rash and provocative (and, frankly, pretty outrageous). He now wants to retreat to a very narrow interpretation of his hypothetical to attack the people who called him on it. The problem for Dunphy is that such an interpretation really makes no sense given the context in which he wrote it.

(*Note: Patterico insists he included this portion of Dunphy’s post in his initial post.)

So Amazon’s Kindle just dropped to $299.

Which gives me the opportunity to post on how much I love mine. The 1984 weirdness aside (and hey, Jeff Bezos apologized!), I absolutely love mine. Never thought I’d need the ability to electronically highlight, bookmark pages, clip and save text, search books for keywords, and make use of a built-in dictionary (put the cursor over any word in the text and a definition pops up; click on the definition, and a longer entry from the Oxford English Dictionary appears), but they make reading much more interesting. They’re also incredibly useful if you’re a journalist or in some other research-oriented field.

The Kindle library is still early in its development. I’m finding that roughly 2/3 of new titles I’m interested in are usually available, and about half of the older books I’ve looked to buy in Kindle form.

(Side note to book publishers: If you send me review copies of new books in Kindle form, I am much more likely to read and possibly review them than if you send me hard copies. When I travel now, I usually just take the Kindle. The thing holds 1,500 books, plus I can instantly download all of the national newspapers and many of the magazines I read (including Reason). I’m much more likely to put your book on the Kindle and look it over on a train or a plane than I am to schlep a hard copy around.)

The e-ink reads the same as an actual book, so it doesn’t trigger migraines the way staring at a monitor can. It’s also perfectly readable in bright sunlight, though if you want to read in darker environs you should invest in a book light.

I really only have one complaint, and even here I may just not be aware of how to get around the problem. But the Kindle has its own odd method of notating locations within in a book. That is, it doesn’t use the same page numbers a hard copy would use. So while the search, text clipping, bookmarking, and comment functions are wonderful for research, if I’m writing a book or paper that requires citation, I’ll need to go out and buy the hard copy to cite to specific pages. Or at least until citing to Kindle’s location system becomes an acceptable form of notation. And again, there may be a way around this. But if there is, it isn’t intuitive.

Finally, if you’re thinking of getting a Kindle, you can make me a little money by buying it through this site. At no extra cost to you, of course.

In response to last week’s arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who’s accused of trafficking black market human organs, Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso dials up the snark, and challenges libertarians who advocate a free market in body organs to defend Rosenbaum.

There are lots of folks out there who need to send kids to school, or replace their siding, or pay off loan sharks — yet our nanny state prevents them from selling their own guts to do it.

We’ve checked McArdle’s site, Reason, Drew Carey — no words of support for Rosenbaum yet. Surely they realize that this is the sort of case that will draw the common people to their side — why the delay? Maybe Movable Type is down.

Ha! Because 15 people dying each day waiting for a lifesaving organ is funny! And useful for scoring cheap political points!

I won’t defend Rosenbaum any more than I’d defend Al Capone or the Juarez drug cartel to argue the folly of alcohol and drug prohibition. That isn’t the argument. The argument is that if there were a legal market in organs, people like Rosebuam wouldn’t be necessary. Oh, and fewer people would die waiting for a kidney.

Erdroso also wrongly assumes the only possible model for an organ market would involve poor people offering up their “guts” on eBay. That isn’t how it’s likely to happen. One scenario, for example, might have firms paying people a sum of money while they’re alive in exchange for access to their organs once they die. Another might pay a donor’s next of kin upon his death.

Edroso might look to Britain, which is facing a severe shortage of sperm and eggs for infertile couples. The reason? British law prohibits the selling of one’s reproductive matter. That isn’t the case in the U.S., where sperm and egg supplies well meet demand. There’s no reason organ recipient lists need to be as long as they are. For Edroso, it’s apparently better that people die waiting for a kidney than for him to have to endure the unpleasantness of contemplating a legal market in lifesaving organs.

One person with far more authority than I did address Rosenbaum’s arrest. Here’s kidney transplant patient Sally Satel in the Wall Street Journal:

According to the complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had brokered such sales many times over the past 10 years.

“That it could happen in this country is so shocking,” said Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the Red Cross.

No, it isn’t. When I needed a kidney several years ago and had no donor in sight, I would have considered doing business with someone like Mr. Rosenbaum. The current law—the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984—gave me little choice. I would be a felon if I compensated a donor who was willing to spare me years of life-draining dialysis and premature death.

The early responses to the New Jersey scandal leave me dismayed, though not surprised. “We really have to crack down,” the co-director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts told MSNBC. That strategy is doomed, of course. It ignores the time-tested fact that efforts to stamp out underground markets either drive corruption further underground or causes it to flourish elsewhere.

The illicit organ trade is booming across the globe. It will only recede when the critical shortage of organs for transplants disappears. The best way to make that happen is to give legitimate incentives to people who might be willing to donate.

Over at Volokh, Ilya Somin also has a thorough refutation of the argument that an organ market would exploit the poor. And as Kerry Howley wrote for Reason a couple of years ago, many in the medical community are already profiting off of your body parts. The law just forbids you from profiting from them.

Here’s Drew Carey and Reason.tv on organ markets:

Andrew Sullivan finds an eloquent opinion from federal appeals court judge Alex Kozinski. The plaintiff was suing under federal civil rights statutes after a police officer stopped and arrested him, apparently in retaliation for a series of obscenities the plaintiff had earlier directed at the cop. Kozinski writes:

Defendant relies heavily on the fact that Duran was making obscene gestures toward him and yelling profanities in Spanish while traveling along a rural Arizona highway. We cannot, of course, condone Duran’s conduct; it was boorish, crass and, initially at least, unjustified. Our hard-working law enforcement officers surely deserve better treatment from members of the public. But disgraceful as Duran’s behavior may have been, it was not illegal; criticism of the police is not a crime.

[T]he First Amendment protects a significant amount of verbal criticism and challenge directed at police officers…

The freedom of individuals to oppose or challenge police action verbally without thereby risking arrest is one important characteristic by which we distinguish ourselves from a police state…

Thus, while police, no less than anyone else, may resent having obscene words and gestures directed at them, they may not exercise the awesome power at their disposal to punish individuals for conduct that is not merely lawful, but protected by the First Amendment.

Inarticulate and crude as Duran’s conduct may have been, it represented an expression of disapproval toward a police officer with whom he had just had a run-in. As such, it fell squarely within the protective umbrella of the First Amendment and any action to punish or deter such speech–such as stopping or hassling the speaker–is categorically prohibited by the Constitution…

No matter how peculiar, abrasive, unruly or distasteful a person’s conduct may be, it cannot justify a police stop unless it suggests that some specific crime has been, or is about to be, committed, or that there is an imminent danger to persons or property.

Alex Knapp makes a very convincing argument.

Georgia police officer responds to false security alarm, shoots and kills family’s black lab in the backyard.

My crime column this week looks at the Gates arrest, and argues that we ought to put race aside and focus instead on the overly broad arrest powers afforded to the police.

Here’s an excerpt outlining a contradiction in conservative thinking that no one has ever really been able to explain to me:

Commenting on Gates’ arrest, National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg wrote that he counts himself among those who are “deferential to police,” and willing to “give cops the benefit of the doubt for a host of reasons.” That’s a common position among conservatives. At a Federalist Society luncheon a few years ago, Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson praised the Supreme Court for “putting more trust in our police officers” in recent rulings. Los Angeles Police Department officer Jack Dunphy (a pseudonym) oddly concluded at National Review Online that the lesson from the Gates/Crowley affair is that anyone who asserts his constitutional rights when confronted by a police officer risks getting shot.

This deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced. Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply.

The only explanation I can come up with for the contradiction is that conservatives are more sympathetic to the targets of regulators (businesses, mostly) than they are to the targets of police and prosecutors (people accused of committing crimes). But that doesn’t change the fact that police and prosecutors are subject to the same trappings of power as other government employees, and so ought to be viewed with the same amount of skepticism. Moreso, actually, given that your average bureaucrat isn’t empowered to arrest you or put a bullet in your chest.

One nice thing about my job is that because of the issues I cover, I get to speak for organizations all over the political spectrum. Last month, I spoke at the same event as Andrew Breitbart and, er, Joe the Plumber. And next month, I’ll be speaking on a panel with Ryan Grim, Mark Kleiman, and David Bratzer at the lefty Netroots Nation conference.

Also, if you’re a Hill staffer, I’ll be speaking on the drug war at a Cato University Capitol Hill event on August 27.

If you haven’t yet become a fan of the NBC show Kings, you should. You can now catch the entire first season on Hulu.

Unfortunately, because Kings is a compelling, interesting, and provocative show on network TV, said network is now likely to cancel it.

You can go to a number of places online to sign a petition to renew the show for a second season. Do it because the world can always use more Ian McShane.

Then again, maybe the show will get picked up by HBO, which could only make it more interesting.

Denver.

Re: The Gates/Crowley fiasco.

Ever notice how the criminal justice incidents that seem to capture the national attention are those that are either amenable to drawing false lessons (Gates was wrong about Crowley profiling him, therefore all claims of racial profiling are bougs; the Jena 6 were inaccurately touted as saintly victims, therefore there is no racial injustice in Louisiana), result in outcomes that almost never happen (false charges against Duke lacrosse players resulted not only in a public pronouncement of their innocence, but actual criminal charges against the power-tripping prosecutor), or otherwise give completely inaccurate assessments of how the criminal justice system actually works (like O.J., violent crime suspects are able to win acquittal via slippery defense lawyers, high-paid and hackish forensic experts, and racially sympathetic juries)?

Not sure why or how it works out that way, but it certainly seems to. Unfortunately, the public’s education about the criminal justice system seems to come chiefly through these high-profile cases. That and prime-time TV series.

Harper is slowly coming around to the new pup. Now I just need to get Daisy to stop eating her own poop.

So we’ve gone highbrow the last few months with the Dylan countdown. We’ll finish the summer by going lowbrow. I grew up in 1980s Indiana. So summer for me will always evoke glam metal screeching from the windows of some blowdried, Guess-jeans-and-IOU-sweatshirt-wearing high school kid’s Iroc-Z, and sweating through puberty slow dancing to power ballads at backyard co-ed parties. The soundtrack to my youth is hair rock.

Part of the difficulty here will be defining the boundaries of hair rock. I don’t plan to include Guns ‘n’ Roses, for example. Over time, Appetite just doesn’t feel like the same species of music as, say, Dr. Feelgood or Open Up and Say . . .Ahh! Pre-1980 or post-David Lee Roth Van Halen doesn’t count, but everything in between does. Metalica? Not hair rock. Neither is KISS. We’re looking for some combination of a 1980s heyday (give or take a couple years), teased-out hair, glitz, mascara, and cliched MTV videos depicting partying, leather pants, headbands, and groupies sporting side boob.

We’ll kick it off with my favorite Van Halen tune, “Panama.”

Homer, Alaska. I didn’t actually catch any of these. I just wanted the photo. You know, for the halibut. (Sorry.)

Details here.