It’s a bit odd how often narco field testing kits turn back false positives. In the past, we’ve seen chocolate chip cookies, deoderant, billiards chalk, and Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap come back positive, all causing undeserved, firsthand familiarity with the criminal justice system for the owners of the innocuous substances.

Looks like we can now add breath mints to the list.

A man is suing the Kissimmee Police Department for an arrest over mints. When officers pulled Donald May over for an expired tag, they thought the mints he was chewing were crack and arrested him.

May told Eyewitness News they wouldn’t let him out of jail for three months until tests proved the so-called drugs were candy…

May was pulled over for an expired tag on his car. When the officer walked up to him, he noticed something white in May’s mouth. May said it was breath mints, but the officer thought it was crack cocaine.

“He took them out of my mouth and put them in a baggy and locked me up [for] possession of cocaine and tampering with evidence,” May explained.The officer claimed he field-tested the evidence and it tested positive for drugs.

The officer said he saw May buying drugs while he was stopped at an intersection. He also stated in his report May waived his Miranda rights and voluntarily admitted to buying drugs.

May said that never happened.”My client never admitted he purchased crack cocaine. Why would he say that?” attorney Adam Sudbury said.

May was thrown in jail and was unable to bond out for three months. He didn’t get out until he received a letter from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the State Attorney’s Office that test results showed no drugs were found.

“While I was sitting in jail I lost my apartment. I lost everything,” he said.

While May was in jail, the police department also auctioned off his car.

Last March, the Marijuana Policy Project announced the results of some lab testing they’d hired an expert to conduct on some of the more commonly used field tests, and found that patchouli, spearmint, and eucalyptus all tested positive for marijuana on one test kid, while an incredible 33 of 42 innocuous substances tested on another came back positive, including vanilla, anise, chicory, and peppermint.

Delayed night exposure of the one road leading into Denali National Park, Alaska.

Novak was one of the few Washington pundits who regularly did actual reporting. I didn’t agree with all of his politics, but he deserves a ton of credit for that. He was also nobody’s hack. I’ve always respected him for opposing the war in Iraq—both of them, actually.

Tim Carney, who worked for Novak, has a nice appreciation.

Also, the picture of Novak now running at Drudge is pretty badass.

The remaining half of America’s great freedom-loving couple has passed away.

We’d all be so lucky to find a partnership like Milton and Rose had.

Rest in peace.

A politician’s idea of romance:

City police are investigating why on-duty marine and helicopter officers helped a Baltimore County state delegate propose to his girlfriend by pretending to raid a boat the couple were aboard, a department spokesman said Monday.

Officers boarded the boat, owned by a friend of Del. Jon S. Cardin, on Aug. 7 in the Inner Harbor. As the helicopter Foxtrot hovered overhead, adding to the sense of tension, one report says officers pretended to search the vessel and even had the woman thinking she was about to be handcuffed before the delegate got on one knee and proposed…

…officers pretended to search the boat and found a box that they suspected contained contraband.

They ordered the soon-to-be fiancee to turn around as if they were about to handcuff her, according the report, and then she saw Cardin “on bended knee” and holding the ring that had been in the box.

The Gazette reported that Cardin was the “toast” of a convention of government leaders in Ocean City this past weekend for his “imaginative marriage proposal.”

Looks like Cardin (nephew of the U.S. senator) found his match. She actually agreed to marry him after all of that. The Baltimore Police Department is currently seeking private donations to keep some of its units in operation. The marine unit in particular was grounded for part of the year last year due to budget cuts.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett lost two front teeth this weekend after being attacked by a man wielding a lead pipe. Barrett was coming to the aid of a grandmother and a young child, both of whom were being attacked by the man.

Barrett deserves all the praise he’s getting for his heroism, but on Twitter, Jon Henke makes a good point. This is the same mayor who backed Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn’s outrageous statements defending his intentions to deny Milwaukee’s citizens their Second Amendment rights.

Back in April, shortly after the Wisconsin attorney general affirmed the right of the state’s citizen to carry in public, Flynn responded:

“My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we’ll put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether you have a right to carry it.”

A local news station reported at the time:

Flynn has the support of Mayor Tom Barrett, who said there should be exceptions for densely populated urban areas.”There’s a fundamental difference between carrying gun in Vilas County on your own land and carrying an AK-47 or Uzi to watch the Circus Parade in Milwaukee,” Barrett said.

But even in more populated areas, it might be helpful to have a pistol if you happen to be attacked, or see someone being attacked, by an assailant armed with a lead pipe. Or worse.

Somehow, I doubt that’s the lesson Barrett will take from this.

There are some new details in the Bob Dylan incident in New Jersey reported over the weekend.

Actually, this first link isn’t new, it just includes information that wasn’t included in the original story I linked to:

According to Long Branch Police Department Sgt. Michael Ahart, Dylan had been peering into a window of a house that was for sale, which prompted a neighbor to call the police on July 23.

This ABC News report also doesn’t mention Dylan peering in a window, but does say he wandered onto the property of a house for sale.

Either case would make the police apprehension of him less troubling, and he was technically trespassing, though once it was clear he didn’t pose a threat to anyone, I’m still not sure he should have to produce identification.

More interesting is this bit from the ABC report about why Dylan may have been wandering around New Jersey in the rain:

Was Bob Dylan looking for the home where Bruce Springsteen wrote “Born to Run” in 1974 when he was detained by police near the Jersey shore last month?

The 68-year-old music legend was picked up one Thursday last month by a 24-year-old cop who failed to recognize him as he walked the streets of Long Branch, N.J. in the pouring rain.

It may have been as simple as it appears: Dylan told police he was talking a walk and looking at a home for sale.

But the area where Dylan was picked up was just a couple blocks from the beachside bungalow where Bruce Springsteen wrote the material for his landmark 1975 album “Born to Run.”

In the past nine months, Dylan has visited the childhood homes of Neil Young and John Lennon, in both cases appearing without fanfare and barely identifying himself after he was recognized.

Last November, Winnipeg homeowner John Kiernan told Sun Media’s Simon Fuller that Dylan and a friend arrived unannounced in a taxi to his Grosvenor Ave. home, where songwriter Neil Young grew up.

Dylan, Kiernan said, was unshaved and had the brim of his hat pulled down over his head. He asked for a look inside and inquired about Young’s bedroom and where he would have played his guitar.

(Edit: Contrary to initial reports, the police now say it was the occupants of the home Dylan wandered up to who contacted them.)

….is on Bernard Baran, the gay Massachusetts man wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 22 years after a child molestation trial driven featuring sex abuse panic, homophobia, and a misbehaving prosecutor.

The column focuses in particular on the prosecutor, who is now a judge. Unfortunately, Judge Ford has never been investigated for his possible misconduct in winning Baran’s conviction.

Reason is hosting a happy hour in Philly on Friday, August 28th.

I’ll be there. You should too.

Here are the details.

Another shot of Pittsburgh, from the roof of the city’s very cool Convention Center.

USA Today notes that even forcing legislators to read the health care legislation in the House probably wouldn’t do much good. The bill is so bogged down with bureaucrat-eze, few of them are likely to understand it.

Take the opening lines of one of the bill’s most controversial sections, the one about voluntary “end of life” counseling:

“SEC. 1233. ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION. (a) Medicare. — (1) IN GENERAL. — Section 1861 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x) is amended — (A) in subsection (s)(2) — (i) by striking ‘and’ at the end of subparagraph (DD); (ii) by adding ‘and’ at the end of subparagraph (EE); and (iii) adding at the end the following new subparagraph: ‘(FF) advance care planning consultation (as defined in subsection (hhh)(1) … “

Complex bills like these are generally written with heavy input from the lobbyists and interest groups who have so much at stake in them. The public doesn’t find out exactly what the implication of striking “and” from subparapraph (DD) might be until the bill has already been implemented.

This is another argument in favor of posting bills in their final form online for a considerable period of time before voting on them, or before they’re signed into law. Crowdsourcing by people who have experience wading through the parentheses and em-dashes might at least help decipher some of the mess to get a clearer picture of what it all means. As it stands, we’re left with the few politicians who helped craft the bill saying, “Just trust us.”

That rarely works out well.

This site has been linked by several lefty blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and a few discussion boards—all on the Whole Foods topic. So here now, a few disorganized thoughts in response to comments posted here and elsewhere.

1) Several commenters have lectured me on free speech and how using consumer power to punish companies you don’t like is part of the free market (inevitably followed by something like, “some libertarian you are!”).  You’re correct!

But I never said you don’t have the right to boycott Whole Foods. Nor did I say there’s anything wrong with the general principle of spending money at companies whose practices you admire, and not spending money at those you don’t. Here’s how it breaks down: Mackey has the right to express his opinion on health care. You have the right to boycott his company because you don’t like that opinion. And I have the right to say you’re a moron for doing so.

2) The reason the boycott is moronic is that you’re punishing a company that does everything the left thinks a company should do in just about every other area (save for a few, noted below) solely because its CEO expressed opinions about health care that you don’t like. And I don’t mind that you disagree with Mackey’s opinions. But if they offend you, you’re way too damned sensitive. He didn’t say, “I think all Americans should have access to health care . . . except for black people.” That would be offensive. He put forth some proposals that he thinks would make the health care system more efficient. You can disagree with those proposals. But if you’re offended by them, you really have a low tolerance for offense.

3) That’s the crux of why I think the boycott is ill-considered, reactionary, and foolish. You’re saying, “These opinions are so horrifyingly offensive, they outweigh all the good your company does, and therefore, I’m going to punish you, your employees, and all of your suppliers.” See, I find that offensive. And yes, that’s in part because I happen to agree with most of Mackey’s recommendations.

4) I say in part because I also think the general premise is ridiculous. I shop at Costco. A lot. If the CEO of Costco wrote an op-ed calling for a single payer health care system, I’d shrug, maybe write a blog post about why I think he’s wrong, and then I’d probably go to Costco this weekend to buy some dog food, some meat, and to try to eat my membership dues in free samples. Now, if the CEO of Costco wrote an op-ed calling for genocide against redheads, then yeah, I’d stop shopping there. But calling for a boycott of a conscientious company over its CEO endorsing proven ideas like HSAs and mainstream policies like tort reform is an attempt to push good ideas you disagree with to the fringe. It’s a way of zoning your opponents best arguments out of the realm of civilized debate. In other words, it’s a way to marginalize your opponents without actually having to debate them.

5) Some commenters say they’re boycotting Whole Foods because it’s too expensive. Okay. So. You want a company that pays its employees well, gives them great benefits, demands high environmental and humane treatment standards from its suppliers, caters to a variety of dietary restrictions, offers organic produce, and manages to keep its prices low so working class people can shop there. Oh, and it can’t be part of the “industrial supply chain,” either, whatever that means. Good luck! Of course, you all hate Walmart because it does keep prices low, but does so by paying its employees less and pressuring its suppliers for lower wholesale prices.

I guess we could just have the government grow, process, and distribute all the food. That seems to have worked really well in North Korea. But then if the government is the only food supplier, how could you wage a boycott when the government doesn’t let the food workers unionize?

Hey, just asking!

6) Speaking of unions, a few others have said they’re boycotting Whole Foods because Mackey won’t let his employees organize. But as noted, his employees have high rates of job satisfaction, and they’re paid better and have better benefits than the unionized employees at other grocery chains. So what’s the problem? If Mackey’s opposition to unions is your reason for hating Whole Foods, sorry, but you don’t really care about workers. You care about unions.

7) Some have said the answer lies in farmers’ markets and co-ops. Farmers’ markets and co-ops are swell if you’re a yuppie commune member or an urbanite foodie. But they aren’t going to feed entire cities. If it makes you feel good to shop at those places, go ahead. I love my local farmers’ market. Mine has great heirloom tomatoes. But I also realize that it’s only open five months out of the year, only sells what can be grown locally, and its stock can be limited by bad weather, pests, and just about any other variable that can hurt a harvest.  Chain stores utilize the economies of scale. They replicate suppliers, so if something goes wrong with one farmer or a drought hits one part of the country, they can back it up with food from another. So you can go ahead and feel morally superior by shopping at the farmers’ market, but don’t pretend that you’re helping the poor. Big companies and industrial farming are why poor people in America don’t starve to death anymore. They’re also why America feeds a good percentage of the rest of the world. I too think corporations can be evil. But there’s no question that industrial farming has immeasurably improved and extended our lives.

8) Why is it that the left is so stridently pro-local when it comes to commerce, but when it comes to government, everything must be nationalized, uniform, and one-size-fits-all?

9) John Mackey opposes single payer health care, preferring to keep health insurance private and competitive. Lefties are angry with his decision to write an op-ed in support of this position, so they’re going to take their business to other grocers whose politics are more in line with their own.

Huh.  Just curious, if we get single payer, and the government does something you don’t like, where are you going to take your business?

I think the cool kids call this this irony.

10) A few emailers took offense to the term “leftists,” or “lefties.” Is that pejorative now? Well, okay. What would you like to be called? As I understand it, “liberal” went out of vogue in the late 1980s. Which is fine, because as a libertarian, I’d actually like to have that word back.

Sorry, but I’m not using “progressive.” It’s a loaded term which implies that the people who disagree with you are opposed to progress. I disagree with you more often than not. And I don’t consider myself regressive. I just have a different concept of progress than you. Also, I don’t quite understand why that word is so popular right now. You do realize that the progressives of the early 20th century were generally anti-abortion, pro-eugenics, and pro-prohibition, don’t you? More than a few of them–including progressive hero Woodrow Wilson-were also ardent segregationists.

But I digress. What exactly should I call you that won’t give offense?

11) If you’re coming here from another website and have made snide cracks about Fox News, hating brown people, supporting unjust wars, or otherwise expressed the tired idea that libertarians are just Republicans who smoke pot, you’ve embarrassed yourself. Read up a little on what we do here, then get back to me.

12) Mackey didn’t deliberately offend his customers, as some have suggested.  He didn’t spit in your face, or, as one commenter so delicately put it, he didn’t “squeeze a turd in [your] punch bowl.” He just overestimated you.

You see, he shared his ideas on health care reform, thinking that you, being so famously open-minded and all, might take to a few of them, or that it at least might start a conversation. I guess he felt he’d built up some cache with you, and wanted to introduce you to some new ideas. His mistake wasn’t in intentionally offending his customers. He’s a businessman who has built a huge company up from the ground. I’m sure he knows you don’t deliberately offend your customers. His mistake was assuming you all were open-minded enough consider these ideas without taking offense—that you wouldn’t throw a tantrum merely because he suggested some reforms that didn’t fall in direct line with those endorsed by your exalted Democratic leaders in Washington. In retrospect? Yeah, it was a bad move. Turns out that many of you weren’t nearly mature enough to handle it.

Hey, the guy isn’t perfect!

13) For the record, over the years I’ve had conservative friends who have refused to shop at Whole Foods solely because they don’t like the politics of other people who shop there. I’ve told them I think they’re idiots, too.

MORE: One more point: Several commenters say it was the Thatcher quote at the beginning of the op-ed that annoyed them most. As I understand it, that was added by the WSJ editors, not Mackey. And it’s true! Call it “socialism” or something else, but the federal government is running historically and frighteningly high deficits, as well as unfunded mandates for entitlements amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars for every U.S. citizen. That isn’t sustainable. And that’s before any new health care proposals are added to the mix. And yes, the Republicans are partly to blame for all of this, too.

Nap time.

Alexandra Natapoff is probably the leading academic expert in the country on the use of informants by law enforcement.

She just started a blog devoted to the issue. Well worth adding to your RSS feed if you’re interested in criminal justice and drug policy.

Full story here. The cop says he tased and arrested her because when she got out of her car, she was blocking traffic and creating a dangerous situation. But when she gets back into the car, he then pulls her back out and throws her down in the middle of the street.

Note too that the though the cop pulled her over for using a cell phone, she was able to prove she didn’t have one. So he wrote her a ticket for going 5 MPH over the speed limit—a figure he calculated without use of radar. I can understand those who say she should have gotten back in her car after the cop instructed her to do so. But I can also understand her anger, and her desire to see the video to prove she wasn’t speeding. The speeding ticket for a paltry 5 mph over seems retaliatory.

She ended up with four tickets, for speeding, talking on a cell phone while driving, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. All of those charges were dropped after prosecutors viewed the video.

Curious to know what the “shut up and do as your told” crowd thinks of this. Should the woman have just accepted the cell phone ticket and not attempted to prove she didn’t have one? Should she have just accepted the speeding ticket that seemed to be retaliation for proving her innocence with the cell phone? Why should she have to endure the hassle of obtaining the dash video and wasting her time in traffic court to prove her innocence? Was the cop right to taser and arrest her? What should happen to him?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Colbert King relayed another story of a police power play during a traffic stop.

The latest display of naivete from Ezra Klein:

What we’re seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It’s distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the “institutional checks” that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government — and by extension, their fellow citizens — capable of.

My friend Will Wilkinson cleans up Ezra’s mess.

I plan to do a lot more shopping at Whole Foods in the coming weeks. Mostly in response to the moronic boycott of the store now gaining momentum on the left.

Let me see if I have the logic correct here: Whole Foods is consistently ranked among the most employee-friendly places to work in the service industry. In fact, Whole Foods treats employees a hell of a lot better than most liberal activist groups do. The company has strict environmental and humane animal treatment standards about how its food is grown and raised. The company buys local. The store near me is hosting a local tasting event for its regional vendors. Last I saw, the company’s lowest wage earners make $13.15 per hour. They also get to vote on what type of health insurance they want. And they all get health insurance. The company is also constantly raising money for various philanthropic causes. When I was there today, they were taking donations for a school lunch program. In short, Whole Foods is everything leftists talk about when they talk about “corporate responsibility.”

And yet lefties want to boycott the company because CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed that suggests alternatives to single payer health care? It wasn’t even a nasty or mean-spirited op-ed. Mackey didn’t spread misinformation about death panels, call anyone names, or use ad hominem attacks. He put forth actual ideas and policy proposals, many of them tested and proven during his own experience running a large company. Is this really the state of debate on the left, now? “Agree with us, or we’ll crush you?”

These people don’t want a dicussion. They don’t want to hear ideas. They want you to shut up and do what they say, or they’re going to punish you.

Seems to me the media accounts of this story are missing the point. Yes, it’s amusing and a bit surreal to picture Bob Dylan wandering around a local neighborhood near where he’s giving a concert. But now everyone’s having a good laugh about how two local police officers had no idea who Dylan was when they stopped and detained him after some residents reported an elderly man acting “suspiciously.”

I don’t know.  I find it pretty depressing. There was a time when we condescendingly used the term “your papers, please” to distinguish ourselves from Eastern Block countries and other authoritarian states. Post-Hiibel, America has become a place where a harmless, 68-year-old man out on a stroll can be stopped, interrogated, detained, and forced to produce proof of identification to state authorities, despite having committed no crime.

I guess I just don’t see the punchline.

I was only in Pittsburgh for about 24 hours this week, but I really, really liked what I saw of it. There’s beautiful architecture, including some gorgeous neo-gothic and art deco buildings. The city has also done an admirable job breaking the rust belt curse. It’s a dynamic, cultural, bustling town, but there are also ample reminders of Pittsburgh’s blue collar roots. It’s one of the most unique American cities I’ve visited. Think I’m going to try to spend a weekend there this fall.

#8 — Cinderella’s “Shelter Me.” I will boldly submit that not only is Cinderella the best of the hair rock bands, but that Heartbreak Station, the album this song is from, is the single best album by a hair rock band. I say “album by a hair rock band” instead of “hair rock album” because Heartbreak Station is too bluesy and versatile to be called hair rock. The album includes sax solos, for goodness sake. Oh, and it’s also chock full of libertarian themes–this song is just one example. We’ll revisit Tom Keifer & Co. later in the countdown.

Store sign in Memphis.

Along the Alaskan Railroad.