Debating Wendy Murphy on age of consent laws and sex offender registries.

I was looking for a video of Deep Purple’s “Hush” and stumbled onto what might be the coolest thing ever uploaded to YouTube.

Possibly the coolest thing ever uploaded to the Internet.

And I had no idea the Playboy After Dark series is available on DVD.

Pretty nifty.

Part of a recurring theme. In addition to my prior post today, here’s a roundup of other photography/video stories in the news of late:

• Earlier this month, Carlos Miller—who runs the Photography Is Not a Crime blog—was “banned” from Miami’s Metrorail system after guards from the firm hired to provide security for the system, and then Miami police officers, wrongly told him he wasn’t permitted to shoot video at the train station. Miller returned this week with his camera and a crew from HDNet TV. Things got violent.
• The Washington Post catalogs a number of incidents in which police have arrested, harassed or detained photographers and cell phone videographers in jurisdictions where the law is quite clear on their right to record and photograph in public.
• The New York Times photography blogger David Dunlap documents another incident.
• Also from the Times, an incident in which a photographer was wrongly stopped by police from taking pictures at an Amtrak station. He was shooting for a photography contest sponsored by Amtrak.

The common thread in all of these stories is that the police were wrong on the law, and the photographers were right. If the photographers had been mistaken, they could be arrested and charged. Not knowing the law isn’t an excuse for breaking it. But when law enforcement officials don’t know the law, and wrongly prevent someone from photographing or recording, or even illegally detain and arrest someone, it’s a shrug and a sigh and we all move on.

Another arrest for shooting video of an on-duty cop, this time in Ohio.

When a deputy sheriff began questioning Melissa Greenfield’s boyfriend at a Delaware County truck stop, she began recording video with her cell phone.

She never thought that she, or her phone, could be viewed as a danger as she documented the activities of public employees in a public place.

“I’m a 115-pound, 20-year-old girl wearing a cervical collar with nothing but a cell phone. I was not going to harm any officer,” Greenfield said yesterday.

However, a sheriff’s sergeant saw the situation differently after Greenfield announced that she was recording video “for legal purposes and our own safety.”

Sgt. Jonathan Burke wrote that he repeatedly ordered Greenfield to place the “unknown” object in her pocket and keep her hands free. When Greenfield refused, she was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.

Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a “cell-phone gun”…

“Not knowing what the item in her hand was and having prior knowledge of all types of hidden weapons, including a cell-phone gun, I asked her several times to place it in her pocket and to keep her hands free,” Burke wrote.

Greenfield said that, while driving her to the jail, Burke said that it was “unacceptable for me to be filming his activities.”

“I wish I could be surprised,” she said, “but I’ve heard so many stories of incidents like this happening before. … There’s no law against videotaping police encounters.”

Emphasis mine, to draw attention to the utter inanity of Dep. Burke’s report.

Greenfield is right. There’s no law in Ohio against videotaping police encounters. Unfortunately, there’s also no punishment for cops who violate the rights of Ohioans who try to do it.Delaware County Sheriff Walter L. Davis III is defending Dep. Burke and his cell-phone gun fears.

Greenfield says when she got the phone back, the video had been erased. Davis denies any of his deputies erased the video. Must have been a glitch.

Greenfield spent three days in jail. She pled no contest to the obstructing official business charge and was fined $20.

• More evidence debunking the claim that illegal immigrants make border towns dangerous. They’re among the safest cities in the country.
• Catalog living.
• Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.) introduces bill that would double federal penalties for medical marijuana dispensaries that bake pot into brownies and other edibles.
• I remember watching that North Korea-Portugal game and worrying about what would happen to the North Korean players. Here’s what happened.
• Of all superheroes, you’d this one would wear a hood.
• Minnesota appeals court says avoiding cops, without breaking any actual laws, is enough reasonable suspicion for them to pull you over.

New York.

This is awful:

Latiana Walton went through most of her labor at Stroger Hospital with an arm and leg chained to her bed, she remembers.

As contractions surged through her body, she could not move or change position to relieve the pain. A Cook County correctional officer repeatedly refused to remove the restraints, she said, even when a doctor objected, saying that he was unable to administer an epidural.

“I actually said to the guard, ‘Where am I going?’ I’m crying. I’m in pain,” recalled Walton, 26. “‘I’m not going to get up and run out of the hospital.’”

On Aug. 27, 2008, Walton, who had been arrested after she missed a court date on a retail theft charge, became one of an estimated 50 women who give birth every year while in the custody of the Cook County Jail.

Shackling women during labor is illegal; Illinois became the first state to ban the practice in 1999, and nine other states have followed suit. But more than 20 former jail inmates, including Walton, have filed lawsuits since 2008 against the Cook County sheriff’s office, which runs the jail, alleging that they were handcuffed by the wrist or shackled by the leg while giving birth. Most of these women, according to their attorney, had been arrested for nonviolent crimes and were awaiting trial…

Officials at the sheriff’s office say their policy follows the law. A pregnant woman can be restrained, according to the policy, until a medical official confirms that she is, in fact, in labor. “When does’labor’ begin? Our officers aren’t trained to know, the state law doesn’t say, so we rely on medical personnel to advise us,” Steve Patterson, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, wrote in an e-mail. “Once a medical person advises us someone is in labor, restraints of whatever sort are removed.”

But the plaintiffs’ attorney argues that restraints were, in his clients’ cases, removed too late or not at all. He contends that sheriff’s officials interpret “labor” as the moments immediately before birth, and that guards sometimes deny requests by doctors and nurses to remove the handcuffs and shackles. “When you talk to these women, they say,’Yeah, when I’m delivering and I’m pushing, that’s what they consider labor,’” said plaintiffs’ attorney Thomas G. Morrissey. “They remain in shackles and handcuffs until the baby is about to be delivered.”

At risk of getting overly high-minded here, this seems like the sort of thing that goes hand in hand with a generation of tough-on-crime talk, and a country willing to put 1 in 100 of its citizens behind bars. It all can have a dehumanizing effect. These aren’t people first, they’re criminals first. Clearly there’s something larger at work when law enforcement officials see a woman in labor not as as a mother-to-be in need of medical attention, but an accused thief and flight risk in need of shackling right up until delivery.

The Cook County lawsuit echoes a story last November from Maricopa County, Arizona, where sheriff’s deputies kept a suspected illegal immigrant shackled to her bed while she gave birth. And of course inMaricopa County, of all places, there’s ample evidence that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies see immigrants as something less than human.

Took full photographic advantage of my Manhattan penthouse perch this week. Lots more of these to come.

Three bullet points of good news this morning. Granted, all three are qualified victories. But hey, that’s better than three bullet points of bad news, right?

• House Financial Services Committee passes bill to legalize, regulate online gambling.
• Congress passes bill narrowing crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity. Goes from 1oo-1 to 18-1.
• House passes bill to create commission on criminal justice reform.
• All My Friends Are Dead
• Michael Kinsley wants you to send him the most boring article you can find.
• Pitchfork Media’s probably illegal camera policy at music festivals in public parks.
• Dee Snider kicks the Gore family while they’re down. And he kinda’ has a point.

Cullman, Alabama:

A local pastor’s complaint about a brand of underwear being sold with “pornographic” pictures on the packaging at the Cullman Walmart reportedly led to a recall of the product.

Frank Boren, pastor of New Hope Christian Center Church of God in the Springhill community, said he noticed the questionable underwear package while shopping at the store in May.

“I was in there shopping for some underwear one day, and looked at the men’s pictures on the packaging,” he said. “On a few of the packages they were very pornographic in the way they were dressed, in skimpy underwear, so I went to the manager and asked her if she thought it was inappropriate to be displayed.”

After filing a few more complaints in the following weeks, Boren said the questionable packaging eventually disappeared from the store’s shelves.

Full story here.

Thanks to Thomas Pearson for the link.

Our concluding arguments have been posted in my Economist debate about legalized gambling.

You should go vote for me, if for no other reason than that my argument includes a bad pun taken from a Kris Kristofferson lyric.

• Institute for Justice: Best way for government to create new jobs . . . is for government to stop preventing people from creating new jobs.
• Peter Bagge on the life of Isabel Paterson.
• Sheriff’s deputies caught on tape conspiring their way around the Fourth Amendment.
• I somehow lucked into a 24th floor penthouse for my 18 hours in New York City. I have an enormous rooftop patio that’s bigger than most bars. Here’s what I woke up to this morning.
• Pentagon announces it lost about $9 billion of Iraq’s oil money.

If you’re going to call me as a known ‘tard (which I’m guessing is short for the charming put-down, retard) and a ‘bagger (which I’m guessing is short for some form of douchebag) because I called Shirley Sherrod a liar for misusing the word lynch, you should probably have read enough about this dustup to know that, well, I didn’t call Shirley Sherrod a liar for misusing the word “lynch”.

In fact, I’m the guy who defended her. It’s a minor detail, I know. But understanding that is kinda’ critical to you being able to comment on all of this without looking like a complete clown. Go back and reread the post you linked to, neophyte blogger. Then try again.

MORE: Looks like he has corrected the post. Thanks!

Jeffrey Lord has responded to my criticism of him for his ignorance of what the word lynching means.

In the face of overwhelming ridicule and criticism, including from his own colleagues and commenters . . . he’s doubling down. Honestly, his response is so weak that picking it apart almost seems cruel. I think it speaks for itself.

He has asked me to post a retraction. That isn’t going to happen.

I’m headed to NYC today to tape another segment for John Stossel’s show. Consider this an open thread until I return. No fighting, loud talking, smoking in the prone position, or playing grabass. Anyone fighting, loud talking, smoking in the prone position, or playing grabass spends a night in the box.

• John Tabin has a good piece on the Journolist silliness.
• Don Draper’s Wall Street Journal pixel portrait. Also, “The Existential Void of Roger Sterling.”
• Tennessee’s lieutenant governor isn’t sure if Muslims deserve First Amendment protection.
• President Wyclef?
• This is a pretty good take on Louis C.K.’s new show. I’m still not quite sure what to make of the show. It can be really, dark at times. You’re alternating between laughing and wanting to gargle with Drano.
• Speaking of cynical….
• Photos of 1970s Anchorage, Alaska.
• More great stuff from the Economist on incarceration nation.

Way cool. Nine more examples here.

Daisy has a new boyfriend here in Nashville. He’s a staffie named Leo who lives in our building. He’s quite handsome.

• It makes sense that they’d have their guns drawn. The bacteria in unpasteurized milk has been known to arm itself with assault weapons.
• Wow. Not sure whether I’d shake the man’s hand or run away from him screaming.
• Injustice Everywhere has posted its police misconduct map for the first half of 2010.
• Southern Republicans starting to question the wisdom of incarceration nation.
• Another police shooting where the police department in question, this time the Colorado Highway Patrol, is being very stingy with information.

• Interesting website of a former cop who has become a medical marijuana activist.
• Well I’m convinced.
• White House pulls the ol’ “dump your bad news on Friday afternoon” trick, announces that deficit will stay above $1.4 trillion through next year. The White House spin: At least it isn’t $1.5 trillion!
• We may be living in someone else’s black hole. (BTW, if you aren’t watching Through the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman on the Science channel, you should be.)
• This seems like a bad verdict.
• New federal law will force states to allow public employees to unionize. This is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but Wendy McElory has the goods on a repercussion of interest to readers of this site: more police unions.
• The Westboro Baptist Church protests are getting a bit hackneyed. Not sure therse people are serious enough to even merit a protest. Unless it’s a protest as awesome as this one.
• As a man wh appreciates a good pun, I’d have bought this book solely for its title. But it looks like a fun read, too.

My favorite comment so far in the Economist debate.

At the time I am writing, there is 53% of the debate’s participants that think that there should be NO legal restrictions on gambling. So I conclude that for Radley Balko and 53% of the participants the following points are not very important problems in comparison with the benefits that society can get from a lack of restrictions or with the sacrosanct idea of freedom.

If there are no restrictions, I think that there are going to be special slots machines for kids in front of every school and a large amount of money to spend in advertising gambling to children. A lot of children are going to become gambling addicts and the gambling industry is going to make a lot of money when they grow up and began earning money. Besides, gambling is going to depreciate the value of money in their minds. 10 euros is nothing because if you are lucky you can win 1,000,000 euros or more by gambling these 10 euros… but in real life 10 euros is more than 1 hour of hard work in a lot of developed countries or 10 days of toil in others.

I grew up in the country side of France and I was 22 when I first entered a casino with some previous exposure to the dangers of gambling. Then, I haven’t become an addict and have gambled less than 3 times in the 8 following years. Now I am living in Colombia where they don’t have the means to tightly control gambling. I can see slot machines in every small grocery in the working-class suburbs where I live and who is gambling? Adults, but also 12 year-olds that seem to be already addicted. When I see that, I assure you that I am happy to have grown up in a country that have the means and the rules to not show me these slot machines when I was that age.

But for Radley Balko, these problems don’t seem very important and I am just amazed that 53% of the participants think like him…

I’m fine with letting elementary school-age children gamble, but only if they’re also legally permitted to drink. It would be cruel to let them wager away their allowance, but then deny them the sweet, melancholy ritual of drowning their sorrows in beer.

Let’s go with the Kinks’ “Living on a Thin Line” this week.

I’m hoping to have video of last night’s show posted soon.

I’m biased of course, but I think it was a terrific episode. Richard and Linda Paey were fantastic, and quite moving. Penn described me as having a comic book super hero name, so that was fun. My former boss at Cato, Tim Lynch, also appeared and made some great points. And the villains were especially villainy.

If you’re wondering, yes, they did manage to work in the usual gratuitous nudity, even in an episode about criminal justice. That’s why it’s gratuitous!

Next week’s episode is titled “Old People.” I’m slightly terrified to see how they’re going to work boob shots into that one.