Indiana.

Here are the details.

I’ll be there.

Techdirt and the Washington City Paper pick up the story of CNN and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger running with my Hayne scoops without acknowledgment.

I’m always a little afraid of sounding whiny in all of this. I’d like credit for my hard work, but it’s true that this sort of thing happens all the time in journalism. You can only “own” a story in the figurative sense. And a Google search will reveal that the Hayne story has been mine since I first started looking into it a few years ago. So it’s not a huge deal. Just frustrating.

The really galling part though, as both Tech Dirt and the City Paper explain, is that the traditional media has itself been whining lately about bloggers and other new media sites using their reporting without proper credit.

This is the most thorough, clear elucidation of the problems with U.S. health care system and their causes that I’ve seen to date.

Possibly the best use yet for a Twitter feed.

A fascinating, counterintuitive article by Steven Pinker on the slow decline of of violence over the ages:

Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that “war is not an instinct but an invention.”

But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth…

When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is…

When the criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured the records of every village, city, county, and nation he could find, he discovered that homicide rates in Europe had declined from 100 killings per 100,000 people per year in the Middle Ages to less than one killing per 100,000 people in modern Europe.

And since 1945 in Europe and the Americas, we’ve seen steep declines in the number of deaths from interstate wars, ethnic riots, and military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, the number of battle deaths has fallen from 65,000 per conflict per year to less than 2,000 deaths in this decade. Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, we have seen fewer civil wars, a 90 percent reduction in the number of deaths by genocide, and even a reversal in the 1960s-era uptick in violent crime.

There’s a terrific book by political scientist James L. Payne (who’s also mentioned in Pinker’s article) called A History of Force that documents all of this in much more detail.

Chicago.

Dear TLC,

What the hell is wrong with you?

Yours,

Radley Balko

(Snapped by a reader in New York City.)

More: Per the comments, here’s a trailer for the show. It features the lovely line: “There’s always a good time to use a Taser.”

These images are identical. Cool explanation here.

KFC makes a bacon sandwich where two pieces of fried chicken serve as the bread.

They call it, “The CSPI Fundraiser.”

Whole Foods stock closed at its highest price in a year on Friday.

It’s up 4 points since CEO John Mackey’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

I had breakfast at the Whole Foods in Old Town today. Delicious made-to-order omelet. Chicken, bacon, sun-dried tomatoes, and cheddar. No one thinks to put chicken in an omelet. It’s the mother and child reunion.

Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger picks up the story about the Mississippi coroners and DAs trying to bring back Steven Hayne.

A couple of interesting things here. First, Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson wouldn’t comment for the paper. When I spoke with him a few weeks ago about all of this, he was quite critical of the plan. Not sure why he’s not talking now.

The other item of note is that Hayne attorney Dale Danks actually admits in the article that Hayne isn’t board certified in forensic pathology. Hayne has maintained all this time, and has testified in court, that he is board certified in forensic pathology, just not by the American Board of Pathology. He told a Jackson TV station in October 2007 after my Wall Street Journal article came out that he “couldn’t remember” the name of the group that had certified him. Is Danks now conceding that every time Hayne has testified in court over the years that he is board certified in forensic pathology, he was lying?

The Mississippi legislature can undo all of this fairly easily. They merely need to pass a law revoking the old law. That would prevent Hayne’s return. I guess we’ll see what happens once they’re back in session.

Jackson station WLBT picks up my report about the Mississippi coroners’ effort to bring back Hayne.

Looks like the plan is moving ahead. Unbelievable.

Or, sadly, entirely believable.

So I guess the important thing here is that CNN is giving the Steven Hayne story national attention.

That’s great.

And I guess I shouldn’t dwell too much on the fact that CNN piggybacked on my three years of reporting without giving me even the slightest acknowledgment. Journalists who have been in the game far longer than I tell me this kind of thing happens all the time. Bigger outlets don’t really feel obligated to credit smaller ones for breaking stories.

Still. A little frustrating.

I’m fairly sure CNN didn’t just stumble into this story on its own. The network’s producers spoke with two of my sources who say CNN’s people explicitly told them that they found their names through my Reason pieces.

Oh well. If this focuses more national attention on Hayne, West, and the people victimized by them, all the better.

Just. You know. A little hat tip would be nice. That’s all.

Not that the fact that it isn’t surprising makes it any less offensive.

In his new book, the first Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, accuses top aides to President George W. Bush of pressing him to raise the terror alert level to influence the 2004 presidential election.

Ridge, a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, says that he refused the entreaty just before the election from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to a summary of the book from publisher Thomas Dunne Books.

“After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector,” Ridge, who resigned soon after the election where Bush defeated Democrat John F. Kerry, writes…

I’ll defer to my boss’s take on this one:

You’re a true patriot, Tom Ridge. When faced with senior administration officials deliberately trying to scare the crap out of the American people to win an election–a tar-and-featherable offense, at minimum–not only did you decide to eventually quit some day, you rushed out and told citizens about their duplicitous leaders in just five short years! For profit!

A banal point to remember, but foundational: Government is materially incentivized to frighten you, about everything. Power–surprise!–corrupts, no matter which set of angels happens to be exercising it this year. Which is why some of us don’t gladly give the stuff over to Washington, D.C.

Yep. That’s certainly true of the Bush administration’s exploitative terrorism scaremongering. But it also only took a few months before the Obama administration started telling us that unless Congress quickly passed his massive recovery plan without debate or scrutiny, we’d all be standing in breadlines.

I’d also add that loyalty is way overrated, especially in Washington. If Ridge is telling the truth now—and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that he is—he’s a coward for not resigning when he should have. It’s a twisted little burgh, D.C., where devotion to party and president trump integrity.

MORE: Loren points out in the comments that Ridge resigned a month after this incident took place. That’s a fair point. Ridge also went public with his disputes over the terror alert system in 2005. I still think it’s fair to criticize him for waiting five years and until Bush is out of office to make the more serious allegation–that the alerts were an attempt to influence the election. But that said, the post above is too hard on Ridge.

We’ll go with Drivin’ n’ Cryin’s “Fly Me Courageous.”

Because it’s not so hard to hide the rattlesnake’s confusion.

I took this photo in Hollywood last year. I have no idea what the sign is advertising. Made me laugh.

I am the World’s Worst Yob #123.

Apparently, I at some point in my life turned into an uncouth, working-class British person.

Right-o, then!

Also, here are a few other things you may not have known about me.

MORE: And then there’s this. I was wondering where the influx of madness to that comment thread was coming from.

Over at The Daily Beast, celebrity legal brain Alan Dershowitz tosses a provocative salvo in the direction of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Earlier this week, the Court ordered (PDF) a federal judge to hold an innocence hearing for Troy Davis, a Georgia man convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Since Davis’ conviction, a number of eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony, casting new doubt on Davis’ guilt.

Joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia dissented from the order (PDF) arguing that the U.S. Constitution guarantees only a fair trial. Once that requirement has been satisfied, actual innocence is irrelevant, even if you can prove it, even if you’re scheduled for execution.

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

Scalia made a similar argument in Herrera v. Collins in 1993 (again with Thomas joining him). Though Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in a concurring opinion that a majority of the court held the view that the Constitution doesn’t permit the execution of an innocent person, that wasn’t the holding in the case, so the Court has never explicitly ruled one way or the other.

Dershowitz begins his challenge to Scalia with a hypothetical:

Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: “Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent.”

Putting the legal issues aside, Dershowitz then gets intriguingly personal. He points to a 2002 essay Scalia wrote for the journal First Things in which Scalia explains that if the Constitution ever contradicted his Catholic faith, he would have no choice but to resign from the Court. Despite the Church’s general opposition to the death penalty, Scalia explained, he could justify upholding death sentences because the Church doesn’t outright prohibit capital punishment, it merely discourages it.

That is not to say I favor the death penalty (I am judicially and judiciously neutral on that point); it is only to say that I do not find the death penalty immoral. I am happy to have reached that conclusion, because I like my job, and would rather not resign. And I am happy because I do not think it would be a good thing if American Catholics running for legislative office had to oppose the death penalty (most of them would not be elected); if American Catholics running for governor had to promise commutation of all death sentences (most of them would never reach the governor’s mansion); if American Catholics were ineligible to go on the bench in all jurisdictions imposing the death penalty; or if American Catholics were subject to recusal when called for jury duty in capital cases.”

But as Dershowitz points out, to say there’s nothing immoral about capital punishment in principle is quite a different proposition than to say there’s nothing immoral about upholding the execution of a factually innocent person.

…whatever the view of the church is on executing the guilty, surely it is among the worst sins, under Catholic teaching, to kill an innocent human being intentionally. Yet that is precisely what Scalia would authorize under his skewed view of the United States Constitution. How could he possibly consider that not immoral under Catholic teachings? If it is immoral to kill an innocent fetus, how could it not be immoral to execute an innocent person?

I suspect Scalia’s answer would be that his only moral obligation as a judge is to ensure that a defendant has been given a fair trial with adequate constitutional protections. Once legal guilt has been established, the moral decision of whether or not to carry out the execution of someone with a strong factual innocence claim falls on the governor or pardon board. Any governor, for example, would of course immediately pardon the man convicted or murdering his still-living wife.

But given the pace of exonerations we’ve seen over the last decade, subjecting a strong innocence claim to the whims of an elected official or appointed pardon board doesn’t feel like a particularly satisfying answer. Derschowitz seems to have cornered Scalia here, though. I’m not sure what other response he could give.

Any Catholic scholars out there want to take a crack?

Cement silo, Indiana.

This story made me well up a little.

Georgia probably never had a playful day in her life.

Both pit bulls are among the 22 dogs that the Best Friends Animal Society renamed the Vicktory Dogs after rescuing them from the Bad Newz Kennel in Virginia owned by Michael Vick. More than 70 dogs were taken from Vick’s compound…

“We feel that in the very near future, Cherry may be ready for foster care,” says John Polis, spokesman for Best Friends.

“When we first got him, he would just splay down on his belly. He had just totally shut down. John had to carry him everywhere in the beginning. He’s doing very well now.”

And Georgia is a star on television and in the publicity arena.

She was on Larry King Live Monday night with Garcia and makes the rounds with him to spread the word about the dogs’ recovery from a life of abuse.

“She had experienced fighting her whole life,” Garcia says. “Now she’s going around meeting people all over with us in places like the Beverly Hills Hilton. We hope that sends a very powerful message. She’s gone from rags to riches. These dogs were the victims. All it has taken is patience.”

I’m obviously a dog person. But I’m fine with Vick’s return to the NFL. He did his time. Now let the man earn a living.

• Angry moms want to ban ice cream trucks from playgrounds.

• U.S. life expectancy hits all-time high, deaths from cancer, heart disease, HIV all down. You’d never know it from the health care debate. Or the obesity debate. I opine on our world life expectancy ranking here.

• The blog Classically Liberal has more difficult details on the Bernard Baran case I wrote about earlier this week, as well as some general observations on the spate of child care sex abuse cases from the 1980s.

• MSNBC shows tight shot of Town Hall protester packing heat, suggests racism against Obama might why people are carrying guns to these events. Problem is, they needed the tight shot, because the guy with the gun was black.

• Declan McCullagh is a heading up a new civil liberties section with the CBS News website. We need more of this.

• Giant robot cage fish farms may soon roam the seas.

• PayPal continues to be evil. My article on how the once-great company fell from grace, or rather was pushed from grace by government, here.