Best Auto-Tune the News yet. Genius, these crazy kids.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

Back in the day, Dylan could do understated kiss-off like no one else.

Email from the first reader who bought a photo:

The print is amazing! The framing was really well done. I still can’t get over the composition of the photograph. Really beautiful.

I am glad you are willing to sell your photos. You have a wonderful eye.

He bought this one.

As for the framing, since the photo was irregularly sized, I had to have it done professionally. And since I regularly slam companies who provide bad service on this site, let me take this opportunity to praise Ah Art & Framing in Arlington, Virginia. The guy is about 50% less expensive than most other framers in the D.C. area, does a terrific job, and is generally a really nice guy. He even took the print apart so I could sign it, then reapplied the backing at no extra charge. He’s also really enthusiastic about what he does, and has a great eye for finding the appropriate matting and frame. I’ve used him several times. Can’t recommend him enough.

Last month, I blogged on a series of DNA exonerations of men convicted of rapes in the early 1980s due to the extraordinary claims of Florida police dog handler John Preston, now deceased. Now a fourth conviction has been called into question.

Questions about Preston’s miracle dogs have persisted for two decades. See, for example, the jaw-dropping Geraldo Rivera 20/20 segment below. One state’s attorney even resigned in protest, stating he wouldn’t be a part of his colleagues "manufacturing evidence."

Yet prosecutors continued using Preston. And still today, even after the exonerations, Florida’s governor, attorney general, and the state’s attorney for Brevard County (where Preston mostly testified) refuse to open an investigation to see if any other convictions may have been tainted by his testimony.

Moose. Girdwood, Alaska.

San Francisco, from hotel room.

Some commenters to today’s morning links post are insisting that Haley Barbour has no connection to the white supremacist, neo-confederate Council of Conservative Citizens.

In fact, he does. In 2003, Barbour attended a barbecue fundraiser sponsored by the CCC. Money from the event went to buy school buses for a “private academy,” the term for private schools established in Mississippi so white parents don’t have to send their kids to public schools with black kids.

When the CCC posted a photo of Barbour at the event on its website, Barbour refused to ask them to take it down. His defense:

“Once you start down the slippery slope of saying, ‘That person can’t be for me,’ then where do you stop? Old segregationists? Former Ku Klux Klan?”

Even if you buy that argument (and I’ve argued that I don’t think politicians should necessarily return campaign contributions from questionable sources), there’s a difference between refusing the support of someone with racist views and allowing your likeness to be used on a racist organization’s website, particularly for fundraising purposes, or to show off the group’s connections to political power.

Barbour also claimed he didn’t know what the organization represented when he attended the barbecue, a dubious proposition given that the CCC had repeatedly been in the news in prior years due to its connections to other GOP politicians.

Barbour’s going to have to come up with some better excuses if he wants to run for president. And the GOP ought to think long and hard before it considers him a legitimate contender for the 2012 nomination Unlike his unfortunate comment about black people and watermelon back in the 1980s, this is all relatively recent.

Thanks to the work of Northwestern University Law School’s death penalty clinic, another man wrongly convicted of murder walked free this week. Ronald Kitchen spent 13 of his 21 years behind bars on death row. He’s also another case of someone who falsely confessed to a murder after intense questioning from police interrogators.

Illinois has sentenced 224 people to death since reinstating capital punishment in 1977. Since then, 20 have been exonerated. I’m not sure what an acceptable rate of error in death penalty cases would be, but nine percent seems awfully high, doesn’t it?

I’ll be on Cincinnati’s WLW this morning at 11am ET to discuss El Paso, immigration, and crime.

Listen here.

Inside an abandoned train car. Cass, West Virginia. I’d like to go back to Cass with my new camera. This was taken with the first digital camera I owned, an old Kodak with pretty low resolution.

Over at The Corner, National Review’s Andy McCarthy sees the Uighur uprising in China as vindication of the Bush administration’s detainment of several Uighur Muslims in Guantanamo:

Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . .

even though the ones we were holding at Gitmo were trained in al-Qaeda-affiliated camps.

The Wall Street Journal (as flagged in the NRO web briefing) reports on rioting in China by Uighur “students” that has left scores dead and hundreds wounded. The “students,” described elsewhere in the story as from a “predominantly Muslim ethnic group[, which has] long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent,” expressed their dissent by torching cars and buses, as well as — according to accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media — rampaging “with big knives stabbing people” on the street.

No reason for non-Muslims in Bermuda, Palau, or the United States to worry, though. The lovable Uighurs are merely trying to address “economic and social discrimination.” Once they get social justice, I’m sure they’ll stop.

There was once a time when, if an ethnic minority was rising up against an oppressive communist regime, you could count on National Review to side with the rabble-rousers fighting for political freedom, not the commies. But I guess that was pre-September 11. Now it’s apparently all about siding with whoever is killing Muslims.

McCarthy might want to look over this FBI report (PDF, via Obsidian Wings) about the Uighurs at Gitmo, whom even the Bush administration conceded were captured by mistake and never posed a threat to the United States.

The Uighurs are moderate Muslims who occupied East Turkestan, which was taken over by the Chinese and renamed the Xinjiang province of China. The Uighurs were offered land in Afghanistan in order to gather personnel opposing Chinese oppression. They were often inspired by Radio Free Asia, which [redacted] was often a broadcaster for. The Uighurs considered themselves to be fighting for democracy, and they idolized the United States. Although the Uighurs are Muslim their agenda did not appear to include Islamic radicalism. They claimed to have no political connection to Islamic terrorists or the Taliban. However, their camp in Afghanistan was bombed, and they fled to Pakistan. The Uighurs were captured by the Pakistanis, with half being transferred to US custody, and half being remanded directly to Chinese officials. It was alleged that the Uighurs who were transferred directly to the Chinese were immediately executed. At the time of my TDY, US officials were considering whether to return the Uighurs to the Chinese, possibly to gain support for anticipated US action in the Middle East.

McCarthy might also want to read this account of the Uighurs plight since China seized what was then called East Turkistan a half-century ago, although it was admittedly written for some crazy left-wing rag:

My homeland has been under Chinese Communist rule for the past 56 years. Uyghurs, like Buddhists in Tibet, are forbidden to pray or speak freely. When Western reporters talk about how China’s political situation is improving alongside rapid economic growth, I know they have not visited East Turkistan. Where I grew up, people today are still being executed for speaking out against injustice. East Turkistan is the only province in the People’s Republic of China where people are still being executed for political reasons. Of course, China no longer labels us “counter-revolutionaries” or “American running dogs.” Now Beijing calls us terrorists, hoping to legitimize their oppression by describing it as part of China’s war on terror.

…and what happened to them after September 11:

…the government seized the opportunity to advance its campaign to assimilate forcefully Uyghurs into the Chinese culture. Uyghur books were burned, and now we Uyghurs can no longer speak our language in universities (and an increasing number of high schools). It is hard to describe to someone who lives in a free society, particularly in America, which has never been occupied, how it feels not to be able to own and speak your language.

Our freedom to practice religion has turned into a privilege regulated by the CCP. Chinese officials recently bragged that three million births in East Turkistan were avoided, meaning that that unborn Uyghur children have been forcibly aborted. In short, the Chinese Communist Party’s assault on the existence of the Uyghur nation has been intensified under the banner of China’s own war on terror. Uyghurs who peacefully oppose this injustice are labeled as terrorists. Many who escaped to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were returned to China and executed. Uyghurs want peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights, including the right to be Muslim.

If the Uighur students are indeed “rampaging ‘with big knives stabbing people’ on the street,” that’s a regrettable form of protest. It’s amusing, though, to see a National Review contributor quote a communist country’s state-controlled media account of anti-government protests in order to make his point.

Wow.

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the administration’s powers to detain someone under the law of war don’t expire for a detainee after he’s acquitted in court. “If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone” under the Supreme Court’s Hamdi ruling, “that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.”

Dick Cheney is smiling.

I’ll be on Lou Dobbs’ radio show today at 4:35 pm ET to discuss my column on El Paso, crime, and immigration.

You can listen here.

After an ice storm, along I-70 in Ohio.

Over at National Review Online, Veronique de Rugy points to this list (pdf) from Taxpayers for Common Sense showing that the federal government currently has 31 various “czars”—more than Russia had in its entire imperial history.

I mentioned it on Twitter, but I forgot to post it here: I’m now writing a weekly criminal justice column for the Reason website.

The inaugural column is up now. It’s on what I think is a fascinating little story: The city of El Paso has a huge population of illegal immigrants, lax gun control laws, high poverty levels, and is right across the border from one of the most violent cities in the world.

Yet last year, there were just 18 murders in El Paso, an incredibly small number for a city its size. Over the last decade, El Paso has had the second or third lowest violent crime rate of any large city in America. The kicker: Immigration may actually be the reason the city is so safe.

New Orleans.

…but I suspect it won’t.

Here’s all I want to say: It is possible that Sarah Palin was both unfairly mistreated and personally attacked by the media and many on the left, and that her family was rather ruthlessly and mercilessly run through the ringer wringer . . . and that she’s a not particularly bright, not particularly curious, once libertarian-leaning governor who sadly devolved into a predictable, buzzword spouting culture warrior when she was prematurely picked for national office by John McCain.

These two scenarios can coexist.

As for quitting her position as governor 18 months early, her rambling press conference statement was bizarre. If she’s quitting because she’s tired of politics and is ready to return to private life for good, good on her. If she’s quitting the job she ran for and committed to because she thinks she’s now too big for the office and wants a higher profile to position herself for national office, then she deserves all the scorn and derision coming her way.

Okay, so first with the awkward part. Due to some changes in my personal life that for obvious reasons I’m not going to get into on the blog (and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t speculate in the comments section), I’m out one dog. For lack of a better phrase, several months ago I lost custody of Isabel.

That suckiness out of the way, on to the fun part. My dog Harper I think grew fond of having a companion, and for the last few months, she’s been out both an owner and a playmate. So she was pretty depressed. I checked with the vet, who said adopting a puppy not only wasn’t likely to bother Harper, it would probably perk her up, and could even add a couple of years to her life (Harper is 10).

Also, I would get a new puppy. So everybody wins.

So after looking around for a few weeks, I found a litter of pups on the website of a rescue group here in the D.C. metro area. They were taken from a high-kill shelter in West Virginia. I chose the smallest sibling.

So meet Daisy. The rescue group says she’s mostly Australian shepherd. I’m a little dubious. But whatever she is, she’s damned cute.