So I got an email from TurboTax this afternoon telling me that my federal tax return has been rejected. Reason? Invalid Social Security number. So I double checked the return. Same Social Security number I’ve been using since I started paying taxes. Same number that’s on my Social Security card. So TurboTax gave me the 800 number of the Social Security Administration so I could call to verify my number. Except that when I called, they told me that they can only verify numbers over the phone for employers, not individuals.

So tomorrow I, loyal citizen, will dutifully drive out to my local “Social Security field office” to make sure my government is still okay with this whole “existing” thing that I’ve been doing. I’d have done it today, except that like any other office whose primary motivation is serving its customers well, the hard-working folks at SSA close at 4 each afternoon.

The kicker: According to the TurboTax help forum I consulted, other people this has happened to say they were fined for filing late, even though they had actually filed on time, and it was the government’s fault that their Social Security number was rejected.

The American Prospect’s Mori Dinauer is just a hair off in this post.

I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.

I will concede that there’s a problem, here. In the private sector, failure leads to obsolescence (unless, of course, you work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, people like Dinauer and, well, the government claim it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government.

It’s a nifty trick. The right does it with national security. The fact that we haven’t had a major terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 proves that the Bush administration’s heavy-handed, high-security approach to fighting terrorism worked! But if we had suffered another attack, the same people would have been arguing that we need to surrender more of our civil liberties to the security state. Two sides. Same coin.

That Pew poll is also a pretty good indication that the more government tries to do, the more poorly it does it. Your usual caveats about correlation and causation apply, but the federal government certainly didn’t shrink over the period the trust-in-government trend line has taken a nosedive. Note too that during the Clinton administration, federal spending actually shrank as a percentage of GDP, and the federal workforce shrank by nearly 400,000, leaving it at its lowest level since 1960. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s one period in the last 50 years over which trust in the federal government took a sharp climb.

But in general—yes—I think the fact that more people are realizing that government isn’t capable of solving all of their problems is an encouraging trend. Because it isn’t.

Dumb, probably drunk kid knocks on an off-duty cop’s door, then runs away. The cop comes out in street clothes, hunts the kid down in his squad car, then lays him over the hood while he calls for backup. According to the cop, the kid then jumps the cop, smacks the cop’s head on the pavement, and reaches for the cop’s gun. So the cop kills him. The kid’s only prior was a 2007 DUI conviction.

I guess the first question here is why you jump in your squad car to hunt someone down for such a petty infraction. And why you make an arrest for it.  And why you need backup.But putting all that aside, the ensuing narrative doesn’t smell right, either. Why would a kid who seemed to have his life in order knowingly take on a cop on the side of the road, in front of witnesses?

Then there’s this:

The Sheriff’s Office did not release details about the case Monday, but officials say they expect the investigation into the actions of Deputy Carlos Verdoni, who shot Spann, to be completed by the end of this week.

The inquiry into the shooting is divided into two parts: a criminal investigation of the shooting; and an administrative look at whether Verdoni followed procedures when he left his home in shorts, a T-shirt and sandals to track down the pranksters who banged on his door and ran off…

Sheriff’s officials are investigating the shooting even though it happened within the Venice city limits. The Sheriff’s Office says it handles all officer-involved shootings in the county, except for those in the city of Sarasota, through an agreement with the smaller police agencies.

Followed by:

Sheriff Tom Knight has said that he believes Verdoni’s actions were justified and that the investigation will clear the nine-year veteran.

So three days after the incident, and days before the investigation is complete, the guy in charge of the department conducting the investigation says he already knows the cop will be cleared. You’d think he’d at least pretend to be impartial.

Maybe this kid had something illegal in his house, and wrongly decided it would be better to kill a cop than subject himself to a possible search. Maybe he just had a moment of derangement. Or drunken idiocy. So yeah, maybe this shooting was entirely justified. But given that Sheriff Knight already seems to have made up his mind, I’m not sure how much stock we should put into his department’s investigation.

• Volcano porn.
• Center for American Progress releases celebratory history of progressivism. Except, you know, all of the bad parts. Never understood why the left migrated to that word, given its history.
• Sarah Palin: Yep. She’s still a moron.
• Now: The FDA takes aim at salt, too.
• Your dog wants steak, may help cure cancer.
• Funny (and horrendously careless) mistake. But pulping and reprinting the entire print run? Were they afraid someone would actually try to follow the recipe?
• As if you needed it—another reason to loathe politics.

Also, today would be a good day to spread the word about our ongoing “successful pot smokers” list.

The National Center on Lesbian Rights points to a civil rights suit 77-year-old Clay Greene has filed against Sonoma County, California. According to the suit, when Harold, Greene’s partner of 20 years, fell ill, the county refused to let Greene visit him in the hospital, despite the couple’s meticulous efforts to name one another in their wills, powers of attorney, and medical directive documents. The county then went to court to argue that the local government should be given control of Harold’s finances, which for 20 years had also been Greene’s. (The county referred to Greene as a “roommate.”)

Despite an unfavorable ruling, the county apparently auctioned off the couple’s assets anyway. According to the lawsuit, the county then terminated the couple’s lease, removed Greene from his home, and confined him to a nursing home against his will. Greene’s partner died three months later. The two weren’t allowed to meet during that three months. Greene has since been released from the nursing home, but says he has nothing left. The county took everything he has.

This of course is only one half of a lawsuit. But unless the claims that Greene and his partner had all their legal work in order are false—and that seems like something that would be too easy to prove for Greene’s attorney to have exaggerated—Sonoma County’s actions here are unspeakably cruel.

The county’s treatment of Greene and his partner is being portrayed in the blogosphere as anti-gay bigotry, and that may well be true. But it also may be just another example of government abusing the elderly to get its hands on their stuff.

Running tally from the Pew Research Center’s “Trust in Government” poll:

SWAT cop detonates a flashbang grenade under the bleachers during a high school convocation.

Just for funsies.

(Thanks to Benjamin Baeker for the link.)

In today’s New York Times, Bill Clinton once again tries to tie the Oklahoma City bombing to those of us who hold “the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.”

Of course he sort of proves those of us who do believe such things right by continually using April 19 to tie us to a deranged murderer instead of acknowledging, taking some responsibility for, or expressing any remorse whatsoever for another anniversary we observe today: the Clinton administration’s slaughter of 76 people, including 20 children, at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Waco gets all of a sentence in Clinton’s op-ed.

Clinton twice invokes America’s founders in the piece: He refers to George Washington’s suppression of the whiskey rebellion, and he explains that the founders “constructed a system of government so that reason could prevail over fear.” I was born on April 19, so I know a bit about today’s history. It’s not just the anniversary of Waco and Oklahoma City, it’s also the anniversary of the battles of Concord and Lexington—the first shots of the American Revolution. That would of course be an occasion of citizens rising up to violently overthrow the government that most Americans—including Clinton—tend to celebrate. And it’s probably worth noting that we threw off the yoke of the crown for violations of human freedom and dignity that were a hell of a lot less severe than what we put up with today.  (Today is also the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—a reminder sometimes violence against those who have deemed themselves in charge is unequivocally justified.)

I don’t think Clinton is calling for censorship of people who, as he puts it, “demoniz[e] the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.” But I do think he’s trying to marginalize those of us who criticize the government—to shunt us to the fringe. And he’s laying groundwork so that the next time some idiot flies a plane into an IRS building, or some madman opens fire on a couple of cops, he can move the ball a bit more toward pinning the bodies on those of us who dare to criticize the now insurmountable federal deficit, the mass looting of the taxpayers that is the public pension system, or the panoply of drug war, criminal justice, and police militarization abuses you read about on this site—to rattle off just a few examples.

I’ve never really felt the need to distance myself from people like Tim McVeigh or Joseph Stack because I’ve never felt any affinity or kinship with them. But just for the record, let me say that taking up arms against the government is moronic and reprehensible for a host of reasons, not least of which is that there isn’t a chance in hell you’re going to win. Beyond that, atrocious as Waco was, murdering a bunch of federal workers, their children, and bystanders, none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with Waco, wasn’t just morally repugnant, it was an act of insanity and delusion (McVeigh actually thought the bombing could have sparked a revolution). And even if one were depraved enough to find some moral justification in Oklahoma City, think of what it did for McVeigh’s cause: Instead of April 19 being the day we remember and lament the Clinton’s administration’s monumental fuck-up, and possibly reflect on massive power of government to simply eliminate people it deems weird or fringe or threatening, Clinton, armed with moral rectitude provided by McVeigh, now gets to take to the pages of the New York Times to celebrate government, and to denounce and marginalize the people who dare to criticize it.

The really mendacious thing about the crap Clinton spews at about this time every year is that unlike the tortured nexus he tries to build between government critics and Timothy McVeigh, his responsibility for the charred bodies at Waco is pretty damned easy to chart. He gets to gloss over all of that now.

The thing is, Mr. Former President, if I may address you directly, is there are far too may public servants who, as you put it, “do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.” I document them every day on this site. And so despite your admonition, I will continue to criticize them for it. And when, for example, they out and out murder innocent people in the name of a senseless, wasteful, and fundamentally illiberal policy (a policy, incidentally, that you enthusiastically support, despite your admission that you yourself have broken the country’s drug laws), I’ll go ahead and, to borrow your word, demonize them for it.

And you know what? I won’t feel the slightest tinge of guilt about doing so. Nor will I feel the least bit of responsibility for acts of anti-government violence, past or future, even when they’re committed in the name of one or more ideas I might otherwise endorse.

Because fundamentally and categorically, I repudiate the use of force and violence to impose my beliefs, political philosophy, or policy preferences on other people. Until you can say the same thing, Mr. Former President (and we both know you can’t), you can spare me your goddamned lecture.

• Washington Post columnist attends Tea Party rally braced for rampant racism and calls to violence. He finds neither.
• The trustworthiness of beards. I’d swap the Amish beard for the cop mustache.
• William Anderson has been covering the trial of Tonya Craft, a Georgia woman who looks to be the victim of yet another overly zealous prosecutor in a child sex abuse case.
• Wish U.S. journalists questioned politicians like this.
• Former FBI agent speaks out in the Amanda Knox case.

Since I’m constantly getting lost, and soon moving to a new city, I figure I should get some sort of GPS device. I’d use it almost exclusively in my car. So what should I be looking for? What are the major differences between a $160 device and one that runs more than $300?

Also, I saw an ad the other day for a charging pad like this one. Anyone own one of these? Is it worth the price? Seems like the travel version would be helpful. Wouldn’t need to remember to bring all of those cords.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the Obama administration’s prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, and it’s outrageous triumphalism after winning an indictment.

As Greenwald writes, it’s now clear that Obama’s “Look Forward, Not Backward” philosophy applies only to high-ranking Bush administration officials who abused their power and position. The people who risked their careers and freedom to come forward to report on those abuses won’t be getting the same consideration. Or put another way: If you break the law to expand the power of government at the expense of the people, you get a pass. But if you break the law to make government more transparent and accountable, expect them to throw the book at you.

The former L.A. police chief died yesterday.

I’m going to be less charitable than my colleague Tim Cavanaugh. I think Gates’ legacy is quite a bit more destructive. The aggressive, militaristic, reactionary approach to policing he popularized in the 1980s (as well as a wholesale lack of accountability and transparency) still reigns in most police departments in this country, even though cities that have moved toward more community-oriented policing tactics have seen better results.

More than any other single figure, we can thank Gates for the popularization of the SWAT team. Here’s an excerpt from Overkill, the 2006 paper I wrote for Cato on the rising use of paramilitary police units:

Longtime Los Angeles police chief Daryl F. Gates is widely credited with inventing the SWAT team in early 1966, though there’s some evidence that the idea was brought to Gates a year earlier, when he was inspector general, by Los Angeles Police Department officer John Nelson. The inspiration for the modern SWAT team was a specialized force in Delano, California, made up of crowd control officers, riot police, and snipers, assembled to counter the farm worker uprisings led by Cesar Chavez.

In search of new methods to counter the snipers and guerrilla tactics used against L.A. police during the Watts riots, Gates and other L.A. police officials quickly embraced the idea of an elite, military-trained cadre of law enforcement officers who could react quickly, accurately, and with overwhelming force to particularly dangerous situations. Gates brought in a team of ex-Marines to train a small group of police officers Gates handpicked for the new endeavor. Gates called his unit the Special Weapons Attack Team, or SWAT. City officials liked the idea, including the acronym, but balked at the word “attack.” They persuaded Gates to change the units name to Special Weapons and Tactics, though the new moniker was purely cosmetic—no change in training or mission accompanied the name change.

SWAT quickly gained favor with public officials, politicians, and the public. In August 1966, former Marine Charles Whitman barricaded himself at the top of a clock tower at the University of Texas and opened fire on the campus below. Whitman shot 46 people and killed 15. Police struggled for more than 90 minutes to remove Whitman from his tower perch. Public horror at Whitman’s slaughter quickly turned into support for Gates’s idea of training elite teams to complement city policing in dangerous situations like the Whitman massacre. SWAT teams subsequently began to pop up in larger urban areas across the country.

Three years later, the L.A. SWAT team engaged in a highly publicized shootout with the city’s Black Panther militia. Publicity from the standoff won the L.A. SWAT team and the concept of SWAT teams in general widespread public acclaim. In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Gates affirmed that the Black Panther shootout propelled the SWAT concept into the mainstream. “It was the first time we got to show off,” Gates said.

The incident also earned the unit a measure of glamour, and inspired yet more police departments across the country to begin training their own SWAT-like units. Gates’s L.A. SWAT team would again be featured in a celebrated standoff five years later, in May 1974, when SWAT officers traded thousands of rounds of gunfire with the Symbionese Liberation Army on live national television.

The SLA and Black Panther shootouts brought continued public fascination with the SWAT mystique. Gates’s experiment soon became a celebrated part of American pop cul-ure. A SWAT-themed television show debuted in 1975, and the show’s theme song hit the Billboard Top Forty. In 1995, Gates launched a SWAT video game franchise with Sierra Entertainment. The SWAT series spawned several award winning “first-person” style shooter games, the most recent version of which was released in early 2005.

Gates was also a hardened drug warrior (he founded the wasteful, ineffective DARE program), and as one of the country’s more prominent tough-on-crime personalities, pushed the war imagery and us-versus-them approach to policing that I’d argue has plagued America’s police departments and the communities they serve for a couple decades. He once told a Congressional committee that drug users should be “taken out and shot,” a comment he later called “calculated hyperbole.” I guess that was his way of deflecting criticism, but his explanation really misses the point. When your average LAPD cop hears his chief say drug users are disposable—at attitude Gates often conveyed in contexts other than at that hearing—it’s bound to have an effect on the way he treats suspected drug users in his day-to-day work. (Gates’ son was also a habitual drug user—though far as I know, Gates never tried to shoot him.) That’s not even getting into the odd racially-charged comments Gates has made over the years.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who covered Gates for the L.A. Times in the 1980s, has posted a pretty damning assessment of Gates’ legacy at LA Observed, focusing on what you might call a Hoover-esque approach to dealing with critics, activist groups, and political opponents. A few excerpts:

When Daryl Gates ran the LAPD from 1978 to 1992 he also ran a worldwide political spying operation. And he lavished time on it, sometimes several hours each day, including all the dossiers and reports he got on the lawful activities of L.A. leaders, elected and not, as well as political and religious groups he suspected were up to no good…

Locally, people of interest had their homes, offices and cars burglarized. Some were tailed, sometimes quite openly to intimidate them, to make sure they knew they were being watched. None of that is in the generally solid obituary of Gates in the L.A. Times today. But there was much more to the story.

There were no limits to what Gates would do to feed his insatiable need for secret information.

There were undercover officers assigned to sleep with women to gather political information that went to Gates, who spent 45 minutes to several hours each week on his spy files…

Locally, people of interest had their homes, offices and cars burglarized. Some were tailed, sometimes quite openly to intimidate them, to make sure they knew they were being watched. None of that is in the generally solid obituary of Gates in the L.A. Times today. But there was much more to the story.

There were no limits to what Gates would do to feed his insatiable need for secret information.

There were undercover officers assigned to sleep with women to gather political information that went to Gates, who spent 45 minutes to several hours each week on his spy files…

At a meeting in South Central that has been used by TV and many screenwriters, a gathering of blacks upset about LAPD violence erupted into demands from one person after another in the audience to attack LAPD officers and division buildings. The leaders at the actual meetings told these people to shut up. Year later court documents showed that the calls for violence all came from undercover LAPD officers, one of whom stole hundreds of dollars from the organization he infiltrated and served as treasurer…

And then there were the burglaries…

I had my cars broken into seven times, once when my Fiat Spyder was parked in the underground garage at Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters. All were smooth jobs – no broken windows or pry marks.

All of these burglaries had a common feature: every scrap of paper was taken, including twin 70-pound trunks of Grantsmanship Center training manuals that my wife used to teach grant writing and which I would take to and from LAX every few weeks when I dropped her off and picked her up. Anyone tailing me must have wondered what was in these trunks…

I knew that during the Vietnam War big city police departments built up their intelligence units. I was skeptical, even dismissive, of assertions by people associated with the ACLU that the LAPD was engaged in massive political spying.

Then one evening in fall 1980 it all changed.

Gates was at a social event and I walked over. After a bit he signaled everyone to go away. Gates was smart in this way, like Henry Kissinger. He always talked to me, knowing it was better to get his oar in and know what was coming than to be surprised.

He asked me, in the crude language of cops, if I liked women with red hair and large bosoms. Sure, I said, what guy doesn’t?

What in the world, I thought, prompted that question?

Immediately, Gates began recounting to me a blind date I had been on a few nights before, down to the details of what we ordered at LA Nicola on Sunset near East Hollywood. He even critiqued the champagne I shared with the woman who has been my wife now for almost 28 years.

Gates went on and on. As he spoke I realized that he had to tell me this. I realized that someone had seen us and knew Gates would want a full report and that Gates had this pathological need to make sure I knew what he knew.

When he had run dry I smiled and, in the sometimes crude language of reporters, told Daryl, which is what I called him, that I did not care if he knew with whom I was intimate.

We each got the other’s message. His was that he was watching me. Mine was that I am not afraid of anything or anybody and cannot be intimidated.

It goes on like that.

Most of the obituaries of Gates thus far have featured praise for his public service tempered with criticism for his mismanagement leading up to and during the L.A. riots.

But Gates’ real legacy is quite a bit more pernicious than mere incompetence.

Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door,” from the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack. IMHO, one of the few examples where the remake is better than the original.

I was a little skeptical when the story of the Pennsylvania school snapping photos of its students through the cameras in school-issued laptops first came out. I thought the story had the signs of being a bit overblown.

I stand corrected. Jesus.

The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district.

More than once, the motion asserts, the camera on Robbins’ school-issued laptop took photos of Robbins as he slept in his bed. Each time, it fired the images off to network servers at the school district.

Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into “a little LMSD soap opera,” a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program.

“I know, I love it,” she is quoted as having replied.

• CIA documents show that responsibility for the destruction of the torture interrogation videos went straight to the top.
• Genetic disorder prevents children from forming racial stereotypes.
• Obama once again breaks his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000 per year.
• I guess I can see how they might be upset.
• “She is getting a greater penalty for having a boy touch her breast than if she killed him.”
• Creepy law enforcement idea of the day.

My Reason.tv colleague Dan Hayes also has an entry in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “I Am Free Enterprise” video competition.

I’ll be on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate this morning at 9:05 am ET to discuss Maryland’s new SWAT transparency bill. You can listen here.

Also, I’m quoted in this article about a SWAT standoff in North Carolina. For once I was actually able to defend the use of a SWAT team.

My colleague Jesse Walker looks at the controversial group, and debunks some of the criticisms coming from lefty groups. Seems like a good liberal ought to be supportive of an organization that, had it existed at the time, would have urged police and military to resist the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or the police actions that made it more difficult for poor people to escape New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

My appearance on Fox News’ Freedom Watch from a few weeks ago is up at Reason.tv.  Judge Napolitano and I discussed NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy and the department’s possible arrest quotas. Click the image below to watch.

• A list of words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary. I don’t know why, but I find this intriguing.
• Old pictures of beards.
• Report: Military diagnosing personality disorders in troops as pre-existing so it can avoid paying benefits.
• Taser International meths up some sheep, then shocks them to test the weapon’s lethality. In addition to the general cruelty, these don’t seem like the sort of tests a company already certain of its product’s “non-lethal” nature would be doing, do they?
• DOJ wants the power to snoop on email without a warrant.

I have a piece in the Washington Times today urging smaller towns and cities to do just that.

I’m Amtrak-bound to New York to tape a segment on asset forfeiture for John Stossel’s show (yes, irony abounds!). The good news is that Accela finally has Wifi. The bad new is, it’s really sluggish. Oh well. On to the links:

• Porn magazine for the blind. I’m not against the idea in principle. Just wondering if the people who came up with it understand what most people are doing while they consume pornography, and how the blind will be able to logistically, er, pull it off. (Sorry.)
• Now the Vatican blames the church’s sex abuse scandal on Teh Gay. The church has, however, forgiven the Beatles.
  
• Traffic deaths in the U.S. hit 50-year low. But the usual suspects want more laws and restrictions.
• The old police professionalism.
  
• Dr. Drew Pinsky helpfully suggests that Lindsay Lohan’s friends or family frame her for a drug crime so she does hard time. You know, because that’ll learn to stop the partying. Jesus. What a creep.

That’s the subject of my crime column this week.