Our rebuttals have been posted in my gambling debate for the Economist.

Go vote! I’m down by six percentage points right now.

I propose….

A new rule for righties: If in the course of a policy debate, bar argument, or blog squabble you mention that the person or organization you’re debating “gets money from George Soros,” you automatically lose the argument, and forfeit your privilege of being taken seriously for no less than six months.

A new rule for lefties: If in the course of a policy debate, bar argument, or blog squabble you mention that the person or organization you’re debating “gets money from the Koch Foundation,” you automatically lose the argument, and forfeit your right to be taken seriously for  no less than six months.

(Disclosure: I have worked for and with organizations and people who have received funding from both George Soros and the Koch family. So this rule would work out pretty well for me.)

I’m not a huge Rachel Maddow fan, but this is pretty devastating.

I first wrote about Bruce Levy’s bizarre arrest last March. Levy headed up the Nashville firm that took over all of Mississippi’s autopsies after the state effectively fired Steven Hayne in 2008. Last spring, the night before the Mississippi legislature was to vote on a bill that stopped an attempt by some Mississippi counties to rehire Hayne, Levy was arrested in a pot sting conducted by Mississippi police.

This week, Levy was indicted by a grand jury. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

Like the Roger Wiener case, this story just doesn’t smell right. The allegation is that Levy purchased a big box of pot and had it FedExed to the hotel he was staying at while he was doing some autopsies in Jackson. I guess that would make some sense if Levy were a (not particularly bright) casual pot smoker and needed a fix. But the police also allege that in addition to the FedEx box, Levy had pot stashed all over his room. If he was stealing drugs off the bodies he autopsied and selling them (as suggested in the linked article), why would he buy another big package of pot while he was staying in Jackson? And why in the world would a doctor who owns his own autopsy firm be engaged in low level pot distribution in the first place?

I should say that at this point I have zero evidence that this was a set-up. And it’s worth noting that the policy agency that conducted the sting reports to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which is currently headed up by Steve Simpson. Simpson is the one who basically fired Hayne, who made the contract with Levy’s firm, and he actively opposed the bill to bring Hayne back that the legislature was scheduled to vote on the day after Levy’s arrest. So it’s entirely possible that Levy was just a really dumb, really careless (but quite successful) doctor who for whatever reason also dealt marijuana on the side. But the timing of his arrest is incredibly coincidental, and the other details we know so far are . . . . really, really strange.

As I’ve covered this Hayne stuff it has occurred to me that HBO could make a pretty wicked dark comedy series about the autopsy/medical examiner business the south. Not only would they not need to change anything from what actually goes on to make the show more interesting, they’d probably need to leave some real-life events out to make it more believable.

From the A.P.:

The number of U.S. police officers who died in the line of duty is up 43 percent so far this year, according to an organization that honors fallen law enforcement officials.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund says that if the trend continues, 2010 could become one of the deadliest years for U.S. police agencies in two decades.

The fund was to release preliminary data Wednesday showing that 87 officers died in the line of duty between Jan. 1 and June 30. That’s up sharply from 61 officers killed during the first six months of last year.

Last year, on-duty officer deaths hit a 50-year low. So what’s behind the increase?

Eugene O’Donnell, professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the number of officer fatalities fluctuates from year to year. However, he said he has noticed an “alarming frequency” of people targeting police.

“There has been a spate of particularly brutal and senseless attacks on the police,” said O’Donnell, a former police officer and prosecutor in New York. “It seems to me, an unprecedented level of disrespect and willingness to challenge police officers all over the place.”

He said a rise in mental health problems and scathing criticism of police, such as the comments found on some blogs, could be fueling the brazenness and disregard for authority.

That sounds like a huge leap. If you look at the National Law Enforcement Fund statistics, 42 of the 87 officer deaths so far this year were from automobile or motorcycle accidents, or from an officer struck by a vehicle. Thirty-one deaths were from gunfire, and 14 were from “other.”*

The 31 gunfire deaths so far this year are up from 22 in the first six months of last year. But I wonder what evidence O’Donnell has that would cause him to attribute an additional nine officer deaths among 900,000 active duty cops to an “unprecedented level of disrespect” and a sweeping trend of “scathing criticism” of cops on the Internet. I don’t know of a single case last year where there was evidence that an officer’s murder could be traced back to anger or resentment on a web forum. I obviously haven’t looked into all 31 officer shootings, but if there was even a hint of a suggestion that the Internet motivated someone to kill a cop, it’s the sort of salacious detail the media would have lapped up and obsessed over for days. And we’d need quite a few of those incidents to make a trend.

Reporters always look for explanations for these sorts of numbers, even when there may not be one. The number of cops intentionally killed while on duty is small enough—especially when compared to the total number of cops working—that nine additional gunfire deaths over six months may well just be a statistical hiccup. The problem comes when people cite figures like these to call for policy changes, or to defend current policies, that favor police protection over civil liberties. For example, it wouldn’t be difficult to envision a politician using O’Donnell’s quote to defend a policy of a arresting and imprisoning people who take cell phone videos of on-duty police officers.

(*The NLEF stats don’t differentiate homicides from accidental deaths. So it’s possible that some of the auto-related or “other” fatalities were homicides, and it’s also possible that some of the gunfire-related deaths weren’t.)

• Emily Bazelon on the prosecutorial overreach in the Phoebe Prince bullying case. Kudos to Bazelon for a skeptical, in-depth, really well-reported piece of journalism.
• The i-dosing silliness gets picked up by the British papers.
• Man has identity stolen by a sex offender, now likely to remain on sex offender list for the rest of his life.
• Jury awards man $855,000 in suit in which he claims he was beaten by Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies. He had been arrested for sexually abusing and killing his infant son. He was acquitted on those charges. I’m sure his last name had nothing to do with any of this.
• ABC News picks up the “arrested for recording cops” story.
• Blind couple nearly lost custody of their child because . . . they’re blind.

So it turns out that it’s illegal for a bar to show Showtime.

So we’ll have to postpone tonight’s meetup. But we’ll do one in Nashville soon.

Ah, the petty tyranny of power-tripping officials in small towns:

Elmhurst officials are considering creating a “disturbance and disorderly conduct” violation after a resident accused of rolling her eyes and sighing was ejected from a public meeting.

City Attorney Don Storino has been directed by the city’s finance and council affairs committee to look at various sources including “Robert’s Rules of Order,” Illinois state statutes and policies adopted by other municipalities for a legal definition of disorderly conduct and disruptive behavior.

He is expected to report his findings to the committee on July 26.

Ald. Stephen Hipskind said Darlene Heslop rolled her eyes and sighed while attending a June 14 committee meeting. Heslop, who was asked to leave the meeting, said she favors adding a definition of disorderly conduct to the municipal code.

“I’d like for them (city officials) to have a better understanding of the open meetings act and its meaning and to understand what disorderly conduct is,” she said.

Under state law, disorderly conduct is “an act in such unreasonable manner as to alarm or disturb another, or to provoke a breach of the peace.”

Heslop, who was asked to leave the meeting during discussion of a proposal for the city to hire a state lobbyist, which she opposes, said she hopes adding the definition will help city officials better understand “what the public is entitled to” when attending a city meeting or conducting city business.

Thanks to T.J. Brown for the tip.

Great piece by the Instapundit in Popular Mechanics.

Here’s how bad it has gotten: Not long ago, an Amtrak representative did an interview with local TV station Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to explain that you don’t need a permit to take pictures there–only to be approached by a security guard who ordered them to stop filming without a permit.

Legally, it’s pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you’re not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, “The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you’re entitled to photograph it.” What’s more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that “the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act.” But this doesn’t stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don’t seem much like national-security zones.

Tennessee law student Morgan Manning has compiled a list of incidents in which individuals were wrongly stopped. Cases like that of Seattle photographer Bogdan Mohora, who was arrested for taking pictures of police arresting a man and had his camera confiscated. Or NASA employee Walter Miller, who was stopped for photographing an art exhibit near the Indianapolis City-County Building and told that “homeland security” forbade photos of the facility. More recently, a CBS news crew was turned back from shooting the oil-fouled gulf coastline by two U.S. Coast Guard officers who said they were enforcing “BP’s rules.”

Unfortunately, Manning notes, although such hassling is generally illegal, it’s hard for the average citizen to get redress in court–how do you calculate the value of deleted snapshots or photos never taken in the first place?

My episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! airs tomorrow night at 10 pm ET on Showtime. Below, a trailer from the episode. As I understand it, Richard Paey will also make an appearance.

For those of you in the Nashillve area, I’m still trying to find a bar that has Showtime and will let us use a TV with volume for an hour. If you would, let me know again if you can make it. Might be easier if I can give a rough estimate of how many people we can expect.

• Andrew Breitbart posts a video taken out of context. Result: A USDA employee is wrongly accused of reverse racism, then fired. The delicious part? Check out the first line in Breitbart’s post. I don’t know which is worse, this partisan scalp collecting fervor, or how quickly employers have shoved the targets of these attacks into the path of an oncoming bus.
• Smart post from my friend Tim Lee on libertarian political alignment. I’m allegedly on the left side of libertarianism, but not becasue of my politics so much as the issues I cover. But I don’t think any broad alignment with either side is necessary or desirable. Better to find allies on an issue by issue basis.
• A contest to design BP’s new logo.
• Homeowner fires at criminals claiming to be FBI agents. Good thing his hunch was correct.
• More on the D.C. wealth boom.
• Traffic enforcement cameras go haywire.

Mine is here. My opponent’s is here.

May the best bald guy win!

MORE:  Interesting. Support from my side went from 85% to 46% in a little over three hours, during which no new arguments were posted. Wondering if a Baptist convention just let out.

Sorry for the dearth of posts today. I’m on a couple deadlines.

But at midnight tonight, you can read the opening salvos in my weeklong debate over at the Economist on whether we should legalize gambling. Readers determine the winner.

I (barely) resisted the temptation to start by asking my opponent if he wanted to place a wager on the outcome.

• Back when I wrote about the obesity debate for Cato, I remember when public schools telling parents their kids are too fat was the sort of thing people on my side of the debate warned about, and people on the other side of the debate said was ridiculous hyperbole. Also, the kid’s BMI is 19.4, and the school is sending home fat warnings? Why not just go ahead and build a vomitorium next to the girls bathroom?
• NGO fight! World Health Organization criticizing Amnesty International for criticizing World Health Organization assessment lauding North Korea’s health care system. Shouldn’t starving a million of your own people to death somehow factor into any assessment of the sort of health care you’re providing?
• Federal judge strikes down Stolen Valor Act, which makes faking military awards and experience a federal crime. I’ve written about this before. The proper remedy here is shame, not prison time.
• Indiana may soon add a $100 doctor’s visit to the cost of treating a cold. Because of the meth.
• More of this, please. Federal judge not only orders sheriff to issue gun permit sheriff improperly denied, but also orders sheriff to take college-level course on the First Amendment.

Boing-Boinger, civil libertarian, MAKE magazine editor, and all-around cool guy Mark Frauenfelder has a new book out: Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World. I am one of the least handy people I know (save, of course, for hanging shelves). So Mark’s book is en route to my apartment, for both instruction and inspiration.

• Looks like we’re back on for an Arrested Development movie. But we’ve heard that before. Hey, why not just bring back the series?
• Las Vegas police are saying there’s some sort of technical issue with the security video taken when police shot and killed a man in a city Costco earlier this month. They also aren’t turning over audio from  the 911 call that brought police to the store in the first place.
• ACLU suing to help a Florida man get his guns back. I’ve hearing more and more of this from the ACLU. Now that the Supreme Court has determined the Second Amendment confers an individual right to gun ownership, many of the organization’s state chapters will take on more gun cases.
• New York Post bites on ridiculous, bogus story about the Taliban training monkeys to become terrorists. Fox & Friends fell for it, too.

The Arizona Republic:

In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.

Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.

“I am trying to send a message to Mexico,” he said. “We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back.”

No word if Arpaio also brought his armored personnel carrier, which has been known to careen out of control and smash into lowly citizen automobiles.

Arpaio isn’t the only sheriff sporting a .50-caliber machine gun. As i wrote in 2008, Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff Leon Lott has one too, mounted to Lott’s own APC. He calls it “The Peacemaker.” I consulted an expert on the appropriateness of the weapon:

Charles Earl Barnett, a U.S. Marines veteran and retired police major who has served on several United Nations and NATO military and peacekeeping missions, says a .50-caliber machine gun is “completely inappropriate” for domestic police work. It “causes mass death and destruction,” Barnett says. “It’s indiscriminate. I can’t think of a possible scenario where it would be appropriate.”

I didn’t specifically ask him at the time, but I’m guessing Barnett would not be inclined to make an exception for “shooting at Mexicans.”

(Hat tip: Say Uncle)

….for insufficient evidence.

This according to the Twitter feed of Richard Abowitz, who’s covering the trial for Reason.

• Government bumbling in John Stagliano’s obscenity trial. Also, The Onion once again forecasts reality. (Links NSFW.)
• Tea Party head attempts satire, fails in spectacular fashion.
• Karl Rove feigns humility, also fails in spectacular fashion.
• A history of the mullet.
• Really great story on the man who beat The Price Is Right.
• Man on the hook for child support payments he missed while in jail, despite DNA test showing he isn’t the father.
• Woman hires a hit man to kill her ex-husband. Ex-husband tells reporter, “The part that insulted me the most is the fact that she was going to pay the hit man so little money.”

Someone needs to tell News 9 and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics that as far as facepalm-stupid attempts to scare the crap out of parents with hysterical “next new drug” stories go, the “digital drugs” thing is so 2008.

(Thanks to Michael Chaney for the link.)

• Crime is down all over Arizona . . . . except in Joe Arpaio’s jurisdiction. Of course, if you send your deputies out to seek out and arrest people for non-crimes (and nonviolent crimes), that’s probably going to have an effect on your crime rate.
• Note that all of the dangers presented in this Guardian scare story about Human Growth Hormone the result of the stuff being (mostly) illegal.
• So we can scratch that question off the list. Case cracked. The eggheads solved it. Way to comb through the evidence for the answer, then pullet out for the world to see. Feather in their caps. Just hope they don’t get cocky. I’ll stop with the yolks, now.
• Government to Haiti: The disaster check’s in the mail. We all know how well that works out. Whatever you think about emergency foreign aid, seems to me the worst way to do it is to promise emergency relief, then leave the people caught in the emergency still waiting a good six months later.
• Vatican issues wishy-washy new policy on priest sex abuse. But the Church does find space in the same document to equate the ordination of women with sex crimes.

• “Repeal Of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Paves Way For Gay Sex Right On Battlefield, Opponents Fantasize”
• Wouldn’t it all be considered somewhat risky?
• Woman saved by “fecal transplant” from her husband. Seems like one area where there would be little problem finding donors.
• Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article explains that Pennsylvanians have right to record police. (And quotes me.)
• So who is going to pay back Toyota and its shareholders? Will Congress now hold hearings where the politicians who earlier this year trashed the company in front of TV cameras now take back their words and apologize for speaking out before knowing all the facts? Why are you laughing?
• Dog trapped in hot car alerts owner by honking horn.

Let me start by saying I have no problem with LeBron James leaving Cleveland for a bigger city, for a team with more talent, for more money, or for any other reason to his liking. It’s his talent. His body. He’s free to market his skills as he pleases. But like just about everyone else outside of Miami, I thought his decision to schedule a 1-hour prime time special on ESPN to make the announcement was tacky and gratuitous. (And shame on ESPN for playing along.)

So I don’t blame Cleveland for hating him.

When LaBron and the Heat visit Cleveland for the first time next season, the game will almost certainly be nationally televised. Cleveland fans could go ahead and boo and hiss when James takes the floor as expected. But that would really be no different than the reaction of every other city who lost a hometown hero to a bigger market. As these things go, what James did to Cleveland was uniquely insulting. So when James comes back to town, Cleveland needs to come up with an appropriately unique collective middle finger to let James know just how his home city feels about him. It needs to be special.

Here’s my idea: Make him play before an empty arena.

Go ahead and buy your tickets to that game. Sell the place out. In fact, for this idea to work you may need to sell the game out way ahead of time. There’s no sense in punishing the Cavs organization for all of this. If you want, have a city pep rally or two the afternoon before the game to let current Cavs players know it’s nothing personal.

But come game time, don’t step foot in the arena. Do go downtown. Patronize the local bars and restaurants. Watch the game from a sports bar. Do some shopping. But keep your tickets in your pocket. Set a goal: See if Cleveland can set an all-time record for lowest attendance at an NBA game. Put so few people in the stands that LeBron’s first dribble actually casts an echo through Quicken Loans Arena. And on national TV to boot.

Any crowd can boo. This would show some civic commitment. It would take some coordination. Some advance planning. It would demonstrate a lingering anger still potent enough to compel an entire stadium of fans to eat the price of a couple tickets. And if it works, it would be  a pretty awesome spectacle to behold.

Even better: There’s a pretty good chance that the first Miami/Cleveland game in Cleveland will be on . . . ESPN.

So I was thinking we could do a meetup somewhere next Thursday.

It could double as a viewing party for the criminal justice episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! featuring some commentary from your humble Agitator.

Anyone have some ideas on where we could do it? We’d need to find a bar with a good-sized TV, and that would let us rope off some space to watch the show with volume.

Also, for planning purposes, how many of you think could make it? The show starts at 9 local time.