I’ve emailed with Fred at LivePodium and we’re going to disable the LivePodium system for the time being. Fred’s going to make some major adjustments then we’ll reassess.

‘Til then, it’s back to the old commenting system.

According to a new CDC study, teen pregnancy and abortion rates are both at historic lows.

The pregnancy rate for teenagers fell 40 percent during the 1990–2005 period, to 70.6 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15–19 years. This rate was the lowest reported since 1976.

The overall decline for teenagers is reflected in significant declines in rates for live births and induced abortions, with much steeper declines for abortions (down 53 percent) compared with live births (down 32 percent). The pregnancy rate declined much more rapidly from 1990 to 2005 for younger teenagers 15–17 years (48 percent) than for older teenagers 18–19 years (30 percent). Pregnancy rates declined by 47–49 percent each for black and white non-Hispanic teenagers and by 23 percent for Hispanic teenagers.

These declines occurred over the same period social conservatives have been warning us about the consequences of a sexualized culture, the mainstreaming and widespread availability of pornography, the licentious nature of the Internet, and so on. But like most major social indicators over the last 20 years (last week, the FBI reported that reported rapes are also at a 20-year low), teen pregnancy and abortion rates are moving in the right direction. And pretty swiftly.

Save, I guess, for obesity. Maybe the next panic will be that America’s teenagers are too fat to have sex.

Old Town Alexandria.

I’ll be on WBAL in Baltimore at 5:05 pm ET today to talk about Prince George’s County, Maryland Sheriff Michael Jackson.

Listen here.

Brown bear. Alaska.

We did a point/counterpoint for U.S. News & World Report.

Read my piece here.  Read McCarthy’s counterpoint here.

I’ve long maintained that Frank and Teressa Belissimmo, generally credited with inventing the Buffalo wing, began the greatest marketing campaign in food history. It was obviously uncoordinated. But think about what’s become of the lowly wing. A fatty, sinewy, not particularly flavorful, high low meat-to-bone ratio part of the chicken has been transformed into a celebrated food item that now comes it its own culture, tradition, and rituals. Before the Buffalo wing, chicken wings were generally thrown out or boiled for soup stock. Now America scarfs down millions of chicken flappers every Sunday afternoon.

I bring all of this up because of this NY Times story showing just how far the wing has come. Chicken wings–bones and all–are now selling for more per pound than chicken breasts. This has spurred some restaurants to start promoting “boneless wings,” in which they cut and cook a chicken breast to more resemble a wing. Not because it’s easier to eat or tastier (though in my opinion it’s both), but because customers want wings, and it’s now actually cheaper to make fake “wings” with breast meat.

Last week, attorneys for special ed student Marshawn Pitts released the security video below, which shows Pitts being beaten by Christopher Lloyd, a police officer in Dolton, Illinois who was working security at the school. Pitts’ attorneys say Lloyd administered the beating because Pitts hadn’t tucked in his shirt, as required by the school’s dress code.

When the video first emerged last week, the Dolton police department refused to release Lloyd’s name. With good reason. Lloyd is in jail in Indiana. He was arrested last month for raping an Indiana woman at knife point. He had also threatened the woman weeks earlier, but apparently wasn’t arrested or disciplined for it.

But it gets worse. Lloyd was also fired last year from another suburban Chicago police department . . . for killing his ex-wife’s husband in front of their children. The town of Robbins fired Lloyd after the February 2008 shooting, but Chicago police bought Lloyd’s claim that the shooting was self-defense, so he was never charged. That enabled Lloyd to find work at the Dalton police department 11 months later.

According to a lawsuit filed by Lloyd’s ex-wife, autopsy reports contradict the police investigation. The autopsy shows that Lloyd shot the man 24 times. When contacted by the Chicago Tribune, a spokesman from Chicago PD said details of the department’s investigation of the shooting “could not immediately be found.”

(Via Carlos Miller.)

The Associated Press has a wonderful story today about my friend, Catoite, and Iraqi war vet Joey Coon’s efforts to bring his Iraqi translator to the U.S. and out of harm’s way.

The U.S. government has treated the Iraqis who helped our troops over there pretty awfully. But this story has a happy ending.

Joey’s efforts to save Bandar are pretty extraordinary. If you need a lift this afternoon, this article will do it.

. . . looks at the political ambitions of Prince George’s County, Maryland Sheriff Michael Jackson.

After a dreadful record as sheriff, including overseeing and then displaying galling callousness, obstinacy, and lack of accountability in the Cheye Calvo raid, Jackson now plans to run for county executive.

The Washington Post says Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Neda, the slain Iranian protester. It’s a nice thought, save for the fact that the can’t be awarded posthumously.

It occurred to me the other day that Kiva, the wonderful organization that facilitates web-based micro-loans between anyone with web access and a credit card to someone in the developing world who needs one, would have been a great pick. Unlike, um, the president of the United States, it’s an organization whose stature, profile, and goals really would have received a boost from the award.

It’s a good day for Austrian/free market economics, and a good day for my alma mater.

Alex Tabarrok has more on this year’s winners, Oliver Williamson and Indiana University’s Elinor Ostrom.

Ostrom is also the first woman to win the award.

(Insert “Obama was robbed!” joke here.)

I’ll turn off the LivePodium comment system for this post so you can register your complaints and suggestions on how to improve it.

Please be constructive. That is, specific complaints and suggestions are helpful. “Go back to the old system” is not. The goal here is to give Fred at LivePodium some feedback to improve his product.

Fred sent me the following message last week, updating the changes he’s made so far, and listing the changes he’s hoping to make soon:

Here is a list of items fixed to date:

1. Text is selectable for cut and paste

2. Mouse wheel scroll support

3. Support of basic HTML tags

4. Reply to text displayed at bottom of Create Comment

5. Cursor and/or focus better positioned at several locations

6. Chatroom count displayed in button

7. Online status in bold

8. Several other minor items

Short term (within a week) items to fix:

1. Full auto login with a log out option

2. Save firewall settings

3. Fix over voting issue

4. Fix mouse out issue on scroll bar

Future feature list:

1. Comment editing

2. Rich text editor with URL autodiscovery, spell check, etc.

3. HTML alternative you can opt out of flash (already planned for mobile devices, SEO, etc.)

4. Full list display (no frame effect within flash)

5. Plus several other ideas

Note to anti-flash crowd:

Flash/Flash Media Server was chosen for the real time message protocol (RTMP) that allows real time communication and online presence. You are not going to make that happen in JavaScript. Many of the complaints mentioning flash are really directed at the user interface design. Flash can be made to look like any UI. But regardless, the alternate HTML interface should address all your concerns.

I’m thinking about taking a few days off in a couple of weeks to bike the Allegheny Trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland.

I’m hoping perhaps some Pittsburgh-area people who have done it can help me out. What’s the easiest way to do this with a car? Are there services that will move your car to your end destination each day? How about lodging along the trail? Expensive? Does it fill up in the fall? I’m looking for inexpensive and low-hassle. Just a few days of riding through autumny goodness with my camera.

I read about the trail in USA Today last week, though. Which probably means way more people than usual now have the same idea.

Hilarious site compiles the worst of Etsy.com.

My eyes are watery. From the laughing. Someone on my Christmas list is getting the masturbating dinosaur wall art.

(Link probably NSFW.)

I won’t fault Obama for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, though I think even he probably agrees he doesn’t deserve it. But the silliness here clearly falls on the Nobel committee.

But it would be menschy and admirable if he politely declined. I mean, imagine if the guy had the humility to say something like…

“While this is a great honor, and I appreciate the hope and faith you’ve put in my leadership, with all due respect, I don’t feel I deserve this award simply out of faith in what I may yet accomplish, or by virtue of the office I hold. I  have much yet to do, and hope that by the end of my presidency I’ll have established a record that merits consideration for the Peace Prize.  In the meantime, I’d encourage the committee to choose one of the dozens of others who are more deserving.”

It wouldn’t just be admirable, I’d imagine it would be hugely poitically popular, too. And it would take the wind out of the sales of the righty pundits dogging him this morning for a decision he had no part in making.

#1: Cinderella’s “Coming Home.”

The song’s credentials: a great guitar riff, a soaring chorus, Tom Kifer’s laboring falsetto, and at 3:12, a triumphant rock ‘n’ roll moment. Everything hair rock should be. And it’s of course a power ballad, hair rock’s defining gift to music.

Call me crazy, but I want Joe Henry to do a cover of this song. Or Solomon Burke.

Memphis.

So a short essay I wrote several years ago for Time about the obesity issue is being used in a couple persuasive writing textbooks.

I guess some English classes now have students post their assignments on the web. It’s kinda’ fun to watch college and high school students use my arguments to stake out their own positions.

Related, I received this fun email yesterday:

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this email. You see I have a dilemma. I have a very liberal (ok lets just say socialist, because she is) English teacher. Our book for the class is the They Say/ I Say 2009 edition in which your essay “What You Eat is Your Business” was published. She is now having us write an essay to summarize your work and write a response. The problem is that she is telling me what to write. What I gathered from your essay is that you want the  American people to have enough common sense and personal responsibility to eat what is good for them. However, my teacher believes that all you are trying to do is give the power to the insurance companies and make people suffer. She keeps telling me that I have read the article wrong and that I have missed the point. I would like to hear the answer from you if you have the time. It would be greatly appreciated and really help me stand my ground and make my point against my teacher, whose veiws are very different from my own.

I emailed him back. Two points of clarification: I don’t necessarily care if people eat what is good for them. It isn’t really any of my business. I also don’t have much love for the insurance companies, who are probably going to be even more powerful and enmeshed with government once we get a health care bill.

But the part about wanting to make people suffer is spot-on.

I have the details in a post over at Hit & Run.

A roundup of wrongful conviction-related stories from the last several weeks:

• Wisconsin court dismisses charges against rape and murder after the prosecutor withheld evidence of his innocence. Ralph Armstrong was convicted in 1981. In 1995, a woman told prosecutors Armstrong’s brother confessed to the crime, but prosecutors never informed Armstrong’s attorneys. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered a new trial when DNA cleared Armstrong in 2005, but prosecutors kept him in prison another four years while they made plans to try him again. Believe it or not, it only gets worse from there. There’s some startling prosecutoral misconduct in this case.

• Florida man released after DNA clears him of a rape for which he served 26 years in prison. Anthony Caravella, who is mentally disabled and was 15 at the time he was convicted, falsely confessed to the crime. His lawyer says he was beaten into a confession. Prosecutors had orginally sought the death penalty.

• Oklahoma prosecutors drop charges, release two former death row inmates convicted of a 1993 drive-by shooting. A federal court threw out their conviction after learning that prosecutors failed to disclose that their main witness and only real evidence in the case had struck a deal in exchange for his testimony.

• The University of Michigan Innocence Project is seeking the release of a man they say was wrongly convicted of rape due to prosecutoral misconduct and junk science. Karl Frederick Vinson has been in prison since 1986 for the rape of a 9-year-old girl.

• Indiana Supreme Court orders state policy agencies to adopt the most stringent rules in the country for videotaping police interrogations of felony suspects.