(Note: There seem to be some LivePodium problems this morning, so the old comments system is enabled until they’re resolved.)

Alaska.

Last month, I posted about Johnathan Ayers, a minister in Georgia who was killed by police who confronted him in the parking lot of a convenience store. Police said the target of their investigation was a prostitute who had been in Ayers car shortly before the confrontation. They say they shot Ayers because he struck an officer with his car. The officers who confronted Ayers were in plain clothes, and emerged from a black, unmarked SUV.

Now the woman, who was later arrested on drug charges, is talking. Kayla Barrett, a 26-year-old admitted drug addict, says Ayers had no involvement in drug activity, had tried for several years to help her get her life straightened out, and was helping her get home on the day of his death. She says she isn’t a prostitute, has never been charged with that crime, and is refuting insinuation on some comment threads to news stories that Ayers was having an affair with her. Barrett says she’d had a miscarriage 11 days before Ayers was killed, and was “not capable” of sex.

Here’s her account of the day Ayers died:

Barrett said Ayers saw her walking from the Exxon station across from the Shell station (where he eventually was shot) back toward Relax Inn, where she and her fiancé were staying.

Since she had experienced a miscarriage 11 days prior and she visibly was having difficulty walking, Barrett said Ayers offered her a ride back to the motel.

“I was in his car for probably about five to seven minutes – and it was probably 20-30 minutes before he got shot,” Barrett said.

“When I got in the car, I was telling him about my recent miscarriage,” she said.

Barrett said she was paying $30 per day to stay at Relax Inn and, on Sept. 1, was three days behind. Her fiancé, who was staying there with her, had hurt his back and was unable to work, she said.

She said they had been doing “odd jobs” and “yard work” to make money.

Barrett said she asked Ayers if he could help her out with the back rent, and that he gave “all the money he had on him” – $23.

“His last words to me were I didn’t owe him anything,” Barrett said. “Probably 15-20 minutes after that I could hear the shots.”

Giving Barrett the last of his cash would explain why Ayers stopped off at the Exxon ATM in the moments before his death.

Pittsburgh.

Okay, I get it. Most of you aren’t crazy about the new comments system. I told you it would be a work in progress.

I’ve asked Fred at LivePodium to put together an update of what he has already changed and what he plans to change, per your suggestions. I have a contract with him to give the system a four-month run, so I guess the options for some of you are to keep complaining on every post for the next 15 weeks, or be more helpful and work with him to get your suggestions implemented.

At the end of the four months, I’ll post a poll. If you want to go back to the old system, we will. But until then, try to utilize some of the live functions, like chat and IM. I’ll host a couple of chats in the coming weeks, too.

I had the opportunity to try something new, and make a little money in the process. All the content you’ve ever seen on this site has been free. I blog because I enjoy it, certainly not because it’s making me rich. But I do own the site. Contrary to some of the email I’ve received, you really don’t have the standing to demand I provide free content to you on your terms.

Again, helpful email and suggestions are welcome. I’m just a little taken aback at some of the invective.

Cato has kindly asked me to join them in an adjunct position as a media fellow.

I accepted, of course. This has no effect on my employment with Reason. But I’m thrilled to be associated (again) with another institution I admire.

If William Bennett ran an anti-smoking campaign. I laughed. Until it hit me that it would probably work.

New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens ‘It’s Gay To Smoke’

Chicago.

My crime column this week is on the police response to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

MORE: Check out this video. Everything up to the macing is terrifying enough. But then there’s the macing.

So as it turns out, even the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has its own SWAT team.

You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids..

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”

Or just wait for the inevitable SWAT team to come and smash them for you.

Inspired by a comment on a friend’s Facebook page. Feel free to add your own nominee.

A reader asked for some autumny Indiana goodness. Here you go.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Google had stopped serving AdSense ads to this site. The reason apparently was because of some porn-related comment spam to a seven-year-old post. I deleted the spam, and they restored the ads a few weeks later.

Last week, they notified me that they’re again suspending ads. And once again it’s because of comment spam to a post from 2002 that according to my logs, all of three people have looked at in the last year.

I’m now thinking someone who doesn’t like what I cover on this site is combing through old posts to find reasons to complain to Google. My web host, P.J. Doland, has since graciously deleted thousands of spam comments left before this site switched to WordPress and a better comment filter in 2006. But I’d imagine that someone who really wants to could still find something to complain about, and Google may still deny me the very small amount of money I get through the program (about $100/month for most months).

Google is a private company, and they can run their program however they please. But I’m also free to complain about it. So I will.

It seems awfully petty to suspend an account for hard-to-control comment spam on old posts almost no one reads.  The system for protesting a suspension of your account is also very impersonal. You’re sort of at their whim. They don’t even have to tell you why they’re suspending or canceling your account. They also reserve the right not to pay you the entire existing balance of your account if, after the fact, they determine you’re serving ads on pages with objectionable content–even if those particular ads didn’t produce any revenue.

It’s all especially aggravating given how much money Google itself willingly and knowingly makes selling ads on porn searches.

This comparison is also pretty amusing.

Daisy’s getting big.

Have to say, I never thought I’d be called a “glibertarian” and a “so-called libertarian” because I’m too optimistic about the criminal justice system.

I write an entire column railing against prosecutorial immunity, and Mr. Houghton pulls out a single line to put me somewhere to the right of James Q. Wilson.

I stand by the line by the way. I don’t think a significant number of prosecutors actually manufacture evidence. I agree that the incentives built into our criminal justice system makes prosecutors overly aggressive (and I’ve written as much, on several occasions). I wouldn’t be at all surprised if an uncomfortably high percentage of prosecutors withhold exculpatory evidence. I’m sure many put on evidence they may not believe is actually truthful. And many may be insufficiently skeptical of evidence brought to them by police, particularly with respect to evidence like statements from jailhouse informants.

None of this is to diminish all of those problems, which are bad enough. But actually manufacturing evidence is a different level of malfeasance. Those who do it should be susceptible not just to lawsuits, but to criminal prosecution. Thing is, most prosecutors avoid taking on an investigatory function in their cases, in part because that isn’t their job. But I’d imagine part of it is also that the lawsuit question is still open. And of those who do, a yet smaller percentage would be devious enough to create incriminating evidence. So yes, I stand by the statement. That doesn’t mean none of them do. I just don’t think it’s a majority, or even a large percentage.

Finally, about that term “glibertarian.” As I understand it, it’s been the left’s way of describing fair-weather libertarians who, for example, blindly lined up behind the Bush administration, or supported the Iraq war, or otherwise are libertarian only on issues that don’t affect them personally. Sorry, but if you’re going to apply the term to me, it’s probably time to retire it. Next time, might want to browse my archives first.

Here’s a quick test to see how the new comments system is working.

The little town of Tenaha, Texas has been all over the news in the last year after several defense attorneys revealed the town’s police had been pulling over motorists along a main highway, seizing their property (cars, cash, jewelry, etc.), then presenting them with an unsavory bargain: Sign a waiver forfeiting all of their property over to the police, or be arrested for drug crimes where, even if innocent, they’d face a night or more in jail and attorney and court fees that would usually amount to more than what the property was worth.

One defense attorney found that of 200 seizures made by Tenaha police between and 2008, just 50 were ever criminally charged. That’s actually about average for forfeiture cases. It’s the bargain Tenaha police struck with motorists, nearly of them black, that’s illegal.

Tenaha’s police department and Shelby County District Attorney Lynda K. Russell—who used forfeiture funds to pay for a Christmas party and to buy tickets to a motorcycle rally—are now subject to a federal civil rights investigation and a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Texas.

Here’s the crazy part: Russell is attempting to use proceeds from the county’s forfeiture fund to pay for her legal defense. That is, she wants to raid the fund she’s accused of stealing from motorists to fund in order ot defend herself from accusations that she stole from motorists to fund it. The ultimate irony here is that when law enforcement officials freeze a suspect’s assets in anticipation of a drug prosecution, the suspect isn’t allowed to use any of those assets to pay for his own legal defense.

The ACLU of Texas is asking the state attorney general to block Russell.

#2: Skid Row’s “Monkey Business”.

The Wisconsin Tourism Federation changes its name and acronym.

I think they should have embraced it, then showered in all the Internet love.