My crime column this week looks at the awful new show The Police Women of Broward County.

French Quarter, New Orleans.

So remember the CPSIA, the onerous new regulation that requires anyone who makes or sells children’s products to pay for expensive lead testing?

Last February I linked to a piece by Tim Carney explaining how the big toy companies had ratcheted up their lobbying efforts in favor of the bill. Carney wrote:

Mattel—whose leaded toys kicked off this whole scare—beefed up its lobbying effort when the legislation appeared. The company’s lobbying budget, which had been steady at $120,000 per year from 2002 through 2006 ballooned to $540,000 in 2007 and $650,000 in 2008—a 442% increase from two years earlier.

In late August 2007, Mattel, the largest toymaker in the world, hired a new lobbying firm, Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart, to lobby on the bill. One of their lobbyists on this issue was Sheila Murphy, recently the legislative director for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic member of the Commerce Committee’s Consumer Affairs subcommittee. Klobuchar became a cosponsor of the bill in late September 2007.

I replied:

Supporters of a massive regulatory state are often the same people who lament the ubiquity of big corporate chains—what you might call the Gap-ification of America. I’ve written a bit about this before, but what they don’t seem to realize is that not only are big corporations more likely than smaller businesses to be able to afford to comply with new regulations, they’re well aware of this fact, and so they’re often the ones pushing the regulations behind the scenes.

I’m pretty cynical about this city. As it turns out, in this case I was wrong. But I only because I wasn’t nearly cynical enough. From the A.P.:

Toy-makers, clothing manufacturers and other companies selling products for young children are submitting samples to independent laboratories for safety tests. But the nation’s largest toy maker, Mattel, isn’t being required to do the same.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission recently, and quietly, granted Mattel’s request to use its own labs for testing that is required under a law Congress passed last summer in the wake of a rash of recalls of toys contaminated by lead. Six of those toys were produced by Fisher-Price.

The new law sets strict limits for lead, lead paint and chemicals known as phthalates. It mandates third-party testing for companies, big and small, making products geared for children 12 and under.

“It’s really ironic that the company that was a principal source of the problem” is now getting favorable treatment from the government, said Michael Green, executive director of the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland, Calif.

Mattel is getting a competitive advantage, Green said, because smaller companies must pay independent labs to do the tests. Testing costs can run from several hundred dollars to many thousands, depending on the test and the toy or product…

CPSC issued no press release about the 3-0 vote in Mattel’s favor, and information on the vote was not posted on the commission’s Web site section pertaining to the CPSIA law.

So while small companies and independent toy makers are getting socked with costly testing requirements, the big toy company whose screw-ups were responsible for the law, who then lobbied for the law, and who then hired a top Hil staffer away to help with its lobbying efforts, was then able to get itself an exemption from the part of the law that’s going to be most expensive for all of its competitors. And the regulatory agency that granted the exception kept it all quiet.

Even by Washington standards, this is just nauseating.

St. Bernard in Bariloche, Argentina.

For his own officers, that is.

Discipline cases against dozens of San Francisco police officers would be dismissed under an amnesty program proposed by Chief George Gascón.

The new police chief told The Chronicle on Wednesday that he wants to see “the great majority” of roughly 75 discipline cases pending before the civilian Police Commission end with little or no punishment for officers accused of minor misconduct.

Those cases, he said, include charges such as use of inappropriate language, being discourteous, failing to properly fill out a police report or a first-time misdemeanor drunken-driving arrest. They would also most likely involve first-time offenders rather than officers with a long history of complaints against them.

“We don’t get anything out of taking a pound of flesh,” Gascón said.

According to Bay area DUI defense sites, penalties for a first-time conviction in California can include six to 30 months of alcohol and driving safety classes, suspension of your driver’s license, up to three years of probation, $390-$1,000 in fines, and the possible installation of an ignition interlock device at your expense.

Will Chief Gascón propse non-police residents of San Francisco get a pass on first time offenses too, or just those residents who also happen to be members of law enforcement?

CORRECTION: The amnesty for drunk driving would be with respect to professional disciplinary action, not to possible criminal charges.

Life imitates South Park.

I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live in a long time, but this parody of Glenn Beck was perfectly executed.

No more blogging today. I’m headed up to Philly for the happy hour with FIRE and Students for Liberty.

Come join us if you’re in the area.

The rest of you, chat amongst yourselves.

Russian Orthodox Church with fireweed. Alaska.

The NY Times has excerpted a portion of my Bloggingheads chat with Matthew Yglesias. It’s on the front page of the Opinon section right now, but also archived here.

Link, story here.

A disturbing new report casts doubt on a recent execution in Texas.

In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state commission on forensics that Texas fire investigators had no basis to rule a deadly house fire was an arson — a finding that led to the murder conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The finding comes in the first state-sanctioned review of an execution in Texas, home to the country’s busiest death chamber. If the commission reaches the same conclusion, it could lead to the first-ever declaration by an official state body that an inmate was wrongly executed.

Indeed, the report concludes there was no evidence to determine that the December 1991 fire was even set, and it leaves open the possibility the blaze that killed three children was an accident and there was no crime at all — the same findings found in a Chicago Tribune investigation of the case published in December 2004.

Willingham, the father of those children, was executed in February 2004. He protested his innocence to the end…

Among Beyler’s key findings: that investigators failed to examine all of the electrical outlets and appliances in the Willinghams’ house in the small Texas town of Corsicana, did not consider other potential causes for the fire, came to conclusions that contradicted witnesses at the scene, and wrongly concluded Willingham’s injuries could not have been caused as he said they were.

The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had “limited understanding” of fire science. The fire marshal “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created,” he wrote.

The marshal’s findings, he added, “are nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation.”

Beyler is the ninth forensic arson specialist to review the case. The other eight came to similar conclusions. The other major piece of evidence against Willingham was the testimony of a jailhouse informant who claimed Willingham confessed to him. Jailhouse snitch testimony tends to be a pretty common second piece of evidence in these stories. Funny how that works.

Willingham isn’t the most sympathetic figure. He was a career criminal, and at his trial witnesses testified to a number of disturbing statements and incidents, including one witness who said Willingham once beat his pregnant wife in an effort to cause a miscarriage.

Death penalty opponents have cast this latest report as proof that Texas executed an innocent man (I should note that after reading initial accounts of the report, I cast the case in a similar light on my Twitter feed). Upon reflection, I think a more accurate characterization would be to say that Texas executed a man who should never have been convicted. The Tribune’s description of the latest report doesn’t say the fire wasn’t caused by arson, it says there wasn’t enough evidence to conclusively say that it was, and that investigators failed to consider other causes.

None of which makes Willigham’s conviction and execution any less disturbing. His case is merely the latest example of the damage done by junk forensics that should never have been allowed in the courtroom—and of the failure of both the trial judge and the appeals courts in allowing it to stand.

Yesterday, I talked SWAT teams, Cory Maye, and Cheye Calvo with PJTV host and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds.

You can watch the interview here.

Cemetery in New Orleans.

I’ve never much bought into the notion that we ought to venerate the dead simply because they’ve died. Nor do I feel the need to reflexively praise politicians for their public service. Ted Kennedy was a lifetime member of the political class. The things he’s being praised and remembered for—his half century in politics, his ability to “get things done” in Washington, his prowess as a legislator (which translates into his ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems), the inherited privilege that came with his last name—none of these things are particularly virtuous in my book.

Here are a few kind words for Kennedy: I don’t doubt Kennedy was sincere when he claimed to speak for the poor or dispossessed. I just happened to disagree with most of his prescriptions for helping them. Kennedy helped liberalize America’s immigration laws. That’s a good thing. Surprisingly, he was a key voice in helping deregulate the airline and trucking industries in the 1970s. We’re all better off for that.

But I feel no compulsion to praise Kennedy’s life in politics. Kennedy was an elite, and not by virtue of any actual accomplishment (sorry, but we have 100 senators no matter who comes out on top on election night. Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole). Instead, Kennedy was an elite by birthright, by being born into the closest thing America has to royalty. He used his status and political power to procure advantages the rest of us don’t have, whether it was evading responsibility for his role in a young woman’s death, or hypocritically killing off a planned wind farm in Nantucket Sound because the renewable energy project would have sullied the view from the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port compound–to pick two examples that bookend his life in politics.

Newspaper editorialists like to eulogize politicians by exalting the sacrifice that comes with public service. I’ve never really believed that. A U.S. Senator’s life is hardly one of hardship. It’s hard for me to find anything particularly praiseworthy or sacrificial about an already-wealthy man adding to his wealth the enormous power that comes with spending 40+ years in the halls of the U.S. Senate. Kennedy played no small role in vastly growing the size, scope, and power of the federal government. In my book, that makes his career contribution to human freedom a net loss.

Finally—and you’d think this would be obvious—honoring a recently deceased politician is a really, really awful reason to pass a trillion dollar piece of legislation.

Because you didn’t get your “Morning Links” today, and because I have browser tabs that need closing . . .

In my Bloggingheads.tv discussion with Matthew Yglesias yesterday, I casually mentioned that Americans spend 40 percent of their income on health care. The number sounded ridiculous as soon as it left my mouth. And it was! This is a peril of these sorts of off-the-cuff but public chats, I guess—not to mention of pontificating on topics outside one’s primary area of expertise.

Anyway, I wasn’t remotely close. The real figure looks to be between 5 and 15 percent.

Health care spending as a percentage of GDP is around 18 percent.

I’ll now humbly link to my Reason colleagues’ more informed work on the health care debate.

This made my morning. Someone has composed an 8-bit tribute to Kind of Blue.

And it’s great.

ThinkProgress blogger Matthew Yglesias and I chatted yesterday for the Bloggingheads.tv site. We actually agreed more than we disagreed. Also, the odd thing about Bloggingheads is that you don’t actually see the person you’re talking to. You chat with them on the phone while watching the video of yourself. The Bloggingheads people then splice it all together. That’s why my eyes are a little shifty. Kept looking at the camera, then looking at myself looking at the camera. Hard to get used to. Anyway, it was fun. Click the image to watch.

In his column for the D.C. Examiner this week, Reason contributor Gene Healy says the Ridge terror alert revelations shouldn’t be surprising, because the entire agency is driven by politics:

Since its creation in 2003, the department has done little to provide genuine security and much to encourage a pernicious politics of fear. We’d be better off without it…

The Homeland Security Advisory System is a case in point. Even before Ridge’s revelation, two separate studies showed that Bush received a boost to his approval ratings with each escalation of the terror threat level. The warning has been raised above yellow (“elevated”) 16 times, but it’s never been lowered to blue or green, the bottom rungs on DHS’s Ladder of Fear. Yet, with Spinal Tap logic (“this goes to 11!”) the department insists on keeping all five levels.

And no politician wants to be the one who has to explain why there was a terror attack after he lowered the threat level to green (signal to terrorists: guard’s down, attack now!).

The department itself is a dog’s breakfast of 22 federal agencies brought together in the hope of providing better coordination on a common mission. But turf battles left key antiterror agencies like the FBI out of the reorganization, and DHS finished last or next to last on every measure of employee morale in a 2006 Office of Personnel Management study.

The truth, as analyst Jeffrey Rosen points out, is that DHS is ‘an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance.” Indeed, a congressional investigation in 2008 documented some $15 billion in failed contracts that have run wildly over budget or been cancelled before completion.

This will never happen, of course. Proposing new cabinet-level agencies is bold and visionary. Suggesting we do away with useless and wasteful agencies is typically dismissed as fringe craziness.

My crime column for Reason this week looks at the unusual connection between the 1997 murder of a Scottish spinster, some embarrassing mistakes by a world-renown crime lab, and the FBI’s attempt to cover those mistakes up so as not to jeopardize the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

It’s an intriguing little story.