So as I mentioned in a previous SEDB post, Daisy is in love. His name is Leo, and he’s a very handsome Staffie mix, also about a year-and-a-half old. Daisy is still a bit skittish around other dogs. But when she sees Leo, it’s kissing, pawing, impossibly cute doggie love. His owner walks him on a pretty regular schedule, which Daisy has now learned. So at about the same time each morning and evening, Daisy goes to the window and waits to get a glimpse of Leo. As soon as she spots him, she goes nuts, circling and pawing at me and panting until I finally take her out to see him.

Sigh. They grow up so fast.

I caught yesterday’s interlude with my camera.

It's about that time.

Same time every evening.

She just caught his scent.

Leo! That's him, to the right of the nose smudges she's made on the window.

Must get closer.

I have sturdy screens. Or she'd probably jump.

Take me to him.

“This is the whitest rally we’ve seen.”

• McDonald’s franchise tells its employees that future raises and bonuses could hinge on them voting Republican.
• Signs from the Colbert/Stewart rally. Several are very funny.
• All I know about this story is what you see here. But what’s there is pretty disturbing. Man is picked up for failing to appear in court on traffic offenses; seven hours later, he’s dead, apparently beaten death by corrections officers. There’s surveillance video, but law enforcement officials haven’t released it.
• Neighbor complaint about “blocked sidewalks” shuts down beloved Halloween maze.
• NPR interviews the scary voices you hear in political attack ads.
• NYPD cop parks in bicycle lane, tickets bicyclists who ride around his car for riding outside of bicycle lane.
• Prison librarian’s memoir details what books prisoners read.

So I was hoping I’d be able to throw together the design for my new Nashville blog even with my extremely limited tech know-how. But none of the plug-and-go WordPress templates is really doing it for me. So I guess I’m going to have to customize.

Anyone out there with some skills want to help me out? I’m not looking for anything too complicated. Drop me an email if you’re interested. I’m willing to pay a little if need be. Or I can give you free promotion on this site and/or the new one.

Hats off the Reason.tv gang for this one. Sources for the quotes here.

From ProPublica and the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

The disciplinary file on the New Orleans Police Department’s Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann is inches thick — as thick as any on the police force.

The lieutenant has weathered more than 50 separate complaints, ranging from accusations of brutality and rape to improper searches and seizures. But none of the allegations ever stuck, although two complaints are still pending. Every time, Scheuermann was cleared and sent back onto the streets.

He has also fired his gun in at least 15 different incidents, wounding at least four people. Experts on police practices say the number is unusual — most officers never fire their weapons.

Scheuermann’s history of complaints would seem to make him an obvious candidate for the NOPD’s early warning system, which aims to highlight and rehabilitate possible problem police officers.

Yet according to the city attorney’s office, Scheuermann was never flagged for entrance into the monitoring program…

Amid the complaints, Scheuermann has received plenty of commendations. The awards depict Scheuermann as a top cop, a relentless workhorse whose arrest numbers are unparalleled and a leader who has patrolled the most dangerous corridors of the city over a 23-year career. He has been a hero in the eyes of many of his peers.

In an NOPD yearbook is a photo of a smiling Scheuermann shaking the hand of former President Bill Clinton, who bestowed a national award on him for “outstanding productivity throughout his career.”

And now?

Today, Scheuermann, 49, is preparing to stand trial on some of the most disturbing charges ever filed against a New Orleans police officer. Federal prosecutors accuse Scheuermann and a colleague of setting fire to a car containing the body of Henry Glover, who had been shot by a different police officer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Again, it isn’t that there was a bad cop at NOPD. It’s that nothing was ever done about it. It in part goes back to the twisted incentives that drive statistics-driven policing.

Agencies encourage officers to be proactive and make arrests, viewing big numbers as a sign of productivity. But when an officer who puts up big arrest numbers is accused of cutting corners or violating civil rights, supervisors often brush it off and declare the complaints unsustained, said Anthony Radosti of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission.

“Where there is smoke, there is fire,” Radosti said. “The more productive you are, the less you are scrutinized. Production means arrests, it’s quantity versus quality. These arrest numbers became more important to the command structure in their efforts to regain control of the crime situation.”

Back in 2008, I talked with former Baltimore cop and co-creator of The Wire Ed Burns about how the numbers game rewards the wrong sort of police work, and does little to make communities safer.

Quick addendum to yesterday’s post on the federal government’s persecution of Siobhan Reynolds. This is the video AUSA Tonya Treadway subpoenaed, along with a host of other documentation, then tried to have silenced. It’s about an hour long.

Siobhan also noted on my Facebook page that she’d like to hire an assistant, but the fines she faced for defying Treadway’s subpoena depleted her finances. If you’re interested, you can make a contribution here.

• The first photo of a human.
• It’s nice to see a piece like this at the American Spectator.
• Mao: He was worse than you thought. But he looks great on a handbag.  Also, it’s fun to name trendy restaurants after him! Note that they don’t use artificial coloring or mass-produce canned produce. Because that would be, like, evil.
• This seems like a bad idea.
• L.A. Times: Disproportionate pot arrests of blacks and Latinos is unconscionable. But to stop arresting people for pot possession isn’t the answer. Which I guess means California cops should start arresting and jailing more white people, too. It’s all about equality.
• “….there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy.”
• I don’t think this cop should be charged. But given similar stories we’ve seen, you wonder if someone who didn’t have a badge would have received the same leniency.
• “Broke Guy Faces $2,000 Fine for Collecting Recyclables”

I posted here last year on Assistant U.S. Attorney Tonya Treadway’s vendetta against pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds. Reynolds’ transgression was to publicly question Treadway’s prosecution of Kansas pain specialist Steven Schneider and his wife.

Treadway, no slouch at playing the media herself, first sought a gag order preventing Reynolds from criticizing the state’s case in public. She then sent federal agents to intimidate the patients speaking out on Schneider’s behalf. When all that failed, she launched a grand jury investigation into Reynolds, demanding Reynolds turn over a mountain of documents related to her advocacy. Treadway then sought, and was granted, an extraordinary seal on any and all documents related to the case. Reynolds isn’t permitted to share documentation from her case with anyone. She had to get permission just to let Reason and the Institute for Justice access the documents so they could submit an amicus brief on her behalf.

Reynolds’ case has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the government is claiming some chilling powers. Here’s my colleague Jacob Sullum:

This level of secrecy, which the Associated Press says “has alarmed First Amendment supporters” who see it as “highly unusual” and “patently wrong,” is clearly not justified by the need to protect the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings. The 10th Circuit decided to seal even the Reason/I.J. amicus brief, which is based entirely on publicly available information. More generally, the gist of the case could have been discussed without revealing grand jury material, as Reynolds’ Supreme Court petition shows. Although the court-ordered redactions make the 10th Circuit’s reasoning as described in the petition hard to follow at times, the details generally can be filled in with information that has been reported in the press (which shows how silly the pretense of secrecy is). Furthermore, one of the main justifications for grand jury secrecy—that it protects innocent people who are investigated but never charged—does not apply in a case like this, where the target of the investigation wants more openness and it’s the government that is trying to hide information. As Corn-Revere argues, such secrecy turns the intended role of the grand jury on its head, making it an instrument of oppression instead of a bulwark against it….

I’d like to show you the Reason/I.J. brief defending Reynolds’ First Amendment rights, but I’m not allowed to!

Bonus points in this case for its ability to attract bipartisan authoritarianism:  Treadway is a Bush appointee, and this all got rolling under his watch. But the Obama administration is not only continuing the case against Reynolds, it’s also arguing in favor of keeping the case hidden from public scrutiny. There are no national security implications, here.  There are no government informants to protect (I guess we don’t know that for sure, but I can’t imagine why there would be, or why their names could be redacted). This is an obstruction investigation into a woman who has criticized the government for what she feels are wrongful prosecutions. It’s telling that Treadway, a federal prosecutor with a history of promoting the hell out of her cases, doesn’t want to anyone to know about this one.

But let’s recap: Treadway tried to censor Reynolds from criticizing her, Treadway, a federal prosecutor. She then tried to intimidate patients of the doctor Reynolds was advocating for from defending him. She then retaliated against Reynolds with a criminal investigation. And she has now gagged Reynolds and barred the public from knowing anything about that investigation. And thus far, on the latter two actions, the federal courts have backed her up.

This is scary stuff.

Texas has released a death row inmate.

After 18 years of incarceration and countless protestations of innocence, Anthony Graves finally got a nod of approval from the one person who mattered Wednesday and at last returned home — free from charges that he participated in the butchery of a family in Somerville he did not know and free of the possibility that he would have to answer for them with his life.

The district attorney for Washington and Burleson counties, Bill Parham, gave Graves his release. The prosecutor filed a motion to dismiss charges that had sent Graves to Texas’ death row for most of his adult life. Graves returned to his mother’s home in Brenham no longer the “cold-blooded killer,” so characterized by the prosecutor who first tried him, but as another exonerated inmate who even in the joy of redemption will face the daunting prospect of reassembling the pieces of a shattered life.

“He’s an innocent man,” Parham said, noting that his office investigated the case for five months. “There is nothing that connects Anthony Graves to this crime. I did what I did because that’s the right thing to do.”

Graves was convicted of assisting Robert Earl Carter in killing a 45-year-old woman, her daughter, and her four grandchildren in 1992. Carter initially implicated Graves, but later recanted. Carter again insisted Graves was innocent just before he was executed in 2000. The man who prosecuted Graves apparently still believes he is guilty.

Charles Sebesta, then the district attorney, did not believe Carter. Even after he no longer held the post, Sebesta held to his beliefs, calling Graves “cold-blooded” and taking out an ad in two Burleson County newspapers in 2009 to dispute media reports criticizing the conduct of prosecutors.

The evidence against Graves was never overwhelming, depending mostly on Carter’s earlier accusation and jailhouse statements purportedly overheard by law enforcement officers. Even Sebesta acknowledged it was not his strongest case.

“I’ve had some slam-dunk cases,” he said in 2001. “It was not a slam-dunk case.”

Yet he still sought—and won—a death sentence. (Sebesta has had problems in other cases, too.)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned Graves’ conviction, noting the considerable weakness of the state’s case against him. That court also found that Sebasta withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and knowingly put on false testimony. Yet as late as last year, prosecutors were still seeking to retry Graves anyway, this time based largely on a “scent lineup,” in which they used dogs to sniff out burnt clothing removed from a 17-year-old crime scene.

…prosecutors this summer brought in Fort Bend County Deputy Keith Pikett to conduct a “scent lineup” – a practice of dubious scientific validity that was recently the subject of a scathing report from the Lubbock-based Innocence Project of Texas. This type of lineup, with dogs supposedly matching a scent from a crime scene to a scent collected from a suspect, is junk science, the Innocence Project charges, while questioning Pikett’s techniques in conducting the dog-led lineup. The procedure has indeed been implicated in a number of wrongful arrests and convictions. According to the report, released Sept. 21, Pikett has no formal training in the practice – nor does he apparently think any is necessary. Pikett has testified in court (in a matter unrelated to Graves) that there is no need for formal training or for scientific rules or protocols when conducting such lineups, and Pikett has rejected the importance of scientific studies regarding scent identification. Nonetheless, prosecutors across the state – including with the Texas Attorney General’s Office – have relied on Pikett for “expert testimony” in a number of criminal cases.

I’ve previously written about Deputy Pikett and the junk science of scent linups here and here.

But hey, Graves was eventually exonerated and released, right? As Justice Scalia would assure us, this case is just more proof that the system is working.

Today’s Comment of the Day comes from HumboldtBlue, in response to this post that I left in the comments section:

So Balko, the only reason anyone with a functioning brain reads Reason in the first place is now calling for a blogger ethics panel? You suppurating wound of supercilious nonsense, you’re a writer for Reason for god’s sake.

You work with a stable of people who are so fucking callous they make a lumberjack’s hands seem like they have been soaking in Palmolive for 12 years.

You bemoan the political classes, you claim to have seen through the teabaggers, and yet, here you are a fucking Republican who just wants to smoke dope. What a sniveling little shit of a post from a sniveling little shit of a man. Smart enough to recognize authority run amok when it comes to the war on drugs but so fucking stupid you make Palin seem a MENSA member.

Face it, Libertarianism is nothing more than sophomoric hubris masquerading as intellectualism. What a fucking tool.

A few things, Mr. HumboldtBlue. First, I always like to start a critique with a compliment. We don’t want to stifle anyone’s creativity!  So in that spirit:

….. suppurating wound of supercilious nonsense

….is a masterful use of alliteration. It also paints a vivid picture. You’ve shown, not told. Well done!

Now, on to the constructive criticism. First, there are some factual errors we need to address. For example, I’m a writer. It being a magazine and all, so is the rest of the editorial staff at Reason. So on average our hands are actually quite soft. Never mind our ideology, for the soft hands alone we’ll probably be among the first wave of executions after the communist revolution.

I know, I know. You were referring to the callousness of our personalities. Still, I think that gets lost in the clunkiness of the lumberjack/Palmolive metaphor. You’re making the reader work too hard. Remember, this is a blog! Worse, it’s a blog written by a libertarian. And it’s read by quite a few libertarians, a group of people, remember, who you think are pretty fucking stupid! So remember your audience! Keep it simple.

Second, as for this line . . .

“…here you are a fucking Republican who just wants to smoke dope.”

I haven’t registered as a Republican since 1998. I voted for John Kerry in 2004. Also, I’m not a pot smoker. But buck up! Two errors in ten words isn’t so bad. And everything else in this line is perfectly accurate!

Let’s move on. I’m going to get a bit more critical now, so prepare yourself. Let’s start with this:

What a sniveling little shit of a post from a sniveling little shit of a man.

This really feels lazy to me. You can do better. “Sniveling little shit” is already overused to the point of cliche. It is evocative, so I probably could still have lived with it had you only used it once. But to use it twice, and in the same sentence, really left me wishing you had come up with something more creative. Perhaps you were using repetition as a rhetorical device, but it really reads as if you just got tired of coming up with colorful ways to express your contempt for me. Which is disappointing, because those first couple lines really had me wanting to believe that you hated me. If I could offer a suggestion: This might be a good time to return to the puss-oozing lesion metaphor. I think it serves you well in a couple ways: It vividly and luridly conveys your disgust for me, and it links me in the minds of your readers to something quite unpleasant—a festering wound. And a call-back is always a good way to keep your audience on its toes. You might even add some extra ickiness the second time around. For example, you might set the sore on someone’s genitals, or perhaps on an anus. That’s the beauty of writing! You are in control!

This brings me to the weakest part of your composition:

Smart enough to recognize authority run amok when it comes to the war on drugs but so fucking stupid you make Palin seem a MENSA member.

I understand that you’re trying to juxtapose my smartness about the drug war with my stupidity . . .  but my stupidity about what? You can’t just say, “You’re smart on the drug war but fucking stupid.” The lack of a second prepositional phrase describing the area of my stupidity in the same manner you’ve described the area of my smartness . . . well, it feels awkward. The way you’ve written this, it sounds as if you’re contradicting yourself. It’s as if you’re saying that I’m really fucking stupid—which, let’s face it, means possibly retarded—but that I still somehow managed to dumb luck my way into having unusually keen insight into “authority run amok when it comes to the war on drugs.”

I just don’t think this is believable.

If you’ll again indulge me the presumption of revising one of your insults of me, in a future draft you might write something like this:

Smart enough to recognize authority run amok when it comes to the war on drugs but so fucking stupid about economic issues that you make Palin seem a MENSA member.

See what I mean? This sentence has structural balance. Now I suspect your intent here was to convey that I’m fucking stupid about everything that isn’t the drug war. I think you’d be on firmer ground just naming a few other topics where I’m fucking stupid. But if you’re really committed to commenting on my overall fucking stupidity, you can simply add the word otherwise. To wit:

Smart enough to recognize authority run amok when it comes to the war on drugs but otherwise so fucking stupid you make Palin seem a MENSA member.

Or, if you’d like to spice things up by adding a nice rhythm to the put-down, trying putting otherwise on the other side of so:

Smart enough to recognize authority run amok when it comes to the war on drugs but so otherwise fucking stupid you make Palin seem a MENSA member.

See how it starts to march a bit once you hit the other side of but?

Also, the MENSA thing? Trite. Are there other indicators of really-fucking-smartness that you might use? Maybe something less obvious, but humorously niche, like, “…so otherwise fucking stupid you make Palin seem like the queen of backgammon.” See how the absurdity of Palin using her limited cognitive skills to dominate something as off-the-wall as a backgammon tournament makes it funny?

Perhaps you want to evoke an indicator of cleverness recognizable only to your fellow lefties. In that case, try something like, “…so otherwise fucking stupid you make Palin seem like she just replaced Paula Poundstone on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…”

Trust me, that’ll have them roaring!

By the way, Mensa is not an acronym. Hope they don’t cancel your membership over that one!

Of course, once you’ve accumulated a bit more skill, you’ll want to explain what’s so “fucking stupid” about recognizing that the same limitations, conceits, and problems with government authority that would cause it to “run amok” in the drug war might also cause it to “run amok” if, for example, we were to put it in charge of health care. But this is composition. We’ll get to all of that when we cover logic.

Overall, this was a pretty good first try. Remember, writing is a process! Hang in there!

….in a post over at Hit & Run.

• Partisanship makes you stupid. Or, an explanation of what happened to the Balloon Juice blog.
• Dog bites man. The government is lying.
• Awesome staff memo from the City Paper editors about attending the Stewart/Colbert rally.
• The economics of Seinfeld.
• Joe Arpaio gives Sarah Palin a pair of pink underwear.
• Heartbreaking drug war photos from Mexico. But remember, the violence means we’re winning!

New Haven has been having some problems with its nightlife. So they’re sending out the SWAT team.

For a moment, employees at a St. John Street cabaret said, they thought they were being robbed when masked gunmen with assault rifles stormed in Monday night.

It quickly became clear, however — as bartenders, patrons and exotic dancers were ordered to the floor and handcuffed — that they were part of some type of raid.

Police had a warrant for a suspected marijuana operation, but it was in a different portion of a 15,000-square foot building that housed several businesses. They just went ahead and raided them all.

“I work hard to run a clean operation,” said Johnny, the owner, who didn’t want his last name used. “They came in here like gangbusters and put guns on people. They know we’re clean.”

One person was arrested on cocaine-related charges, but Hoffman said it was an on-site arrest, not because of the search warrant.

“These guys are no joke,” said one eyewitness who was at the raid and like other patrons, staff and “handcuffed, naked strippers,” was prone on the floor.

He saw agents charging in, some in masks.

“Battering rams, bulletproof shields, assault rifles. They had 30 to 35 people on the floor in cuffs and this whole building was locked down in a matter of three or four minutes,” the man said, not wanting to provide his name.

This comes a few weeks after New Haven police sent the SWAT team to raid a bar where there was suspected underage drinking.

Police arrested five Yale students, including one who ended up in the hospital after officers Tased and subdued him. Police said the student was kicking and punching three officers. Eyewitnesses said a cop punched and kicked and Tased the student with no provocation beyond a request to make a phone call, while other students were threatened with arrest if they used cell phone cameras or sent text messages, according to this story and this story in the Yale Daily News.

“It was beyond overreaction. They were like storm troopers,” claimed John Carta, attorney for the club’s owner, Rommerro Farrah. Click here to read a letter he sent Monday to the police chief.

The incident occurred a week after similar complaints followed the arrest of a Quinnipiac University student who was video-recording an arrest outside Toad’s Place. The video captured both a bouncer and a cop ordering him to put away his cell phone camera. Chief Limon said the student was arrested not for taking the video, but for disobeying police commands and interfering with an investigation and with his friend’s arrest.

More on the student raids here and here.

Literal slapstick.

In August I posted about Felicia Gibson, a North Carolina woman who was arrested and later convicted of “resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer.” Gibson’s transgression? She recorded a traffic stop on her street. She was on her own porch at the time. A number of people were viewing the stop, but only Gibson was recording it, and only Gibson was arrested.

Gibson was convicted by Rowan County District Court Juge Beth Dixon. Dixon is up for reelection next week, and photography activist Carlos Miller is launching a last-minute Facebook campaign targeted at users in her county.

It’s been almost two months since North Carolina judge Beth Dixon was forced to remove her Facebook campaign page after an onslaught of criticism from people who did not appreciate the way she trampled on the First Amendment.

Now with just over a week to go before the Rowan County District Court election, the two-term incumbent is hoping that local voters will not allow such petty meeatmories to vote her out of office.

After all, since that controversial ruling in late August, the local media has virtually ignored this election.

However, I’ve just relaunched a Facebook ad campaign targeting voters in her area in the hopes that they will vote against her on November 2.

Miller’s Facebook page making the case against Dixon is here.

• Disturbing “sexy” Halloween costumes. How about “Sexy Glenn Beck”?
• War photographer loses legs to a landmine, continues to shoot photos.
• DHS Sec. Napolitano unveils nudie body scanners, declines to subject herself to the peep show. They’re just for you regular people, you know.
• Heard a chat on NPR this morning in which three pundits lamented the end of democracy, citing all the money corporations and Republicans were spending on the mid-term elections. No one seemed bothered that the public employees union is spending more than all of them. Of course, they’re spending money for the right reasons. Like to protect those ridiculous pensions that are going to bankrupt a number of state governments.
• Google now giving more money to GOP than Dems. I’m thinking this possibly has something to do with it.
• DA uses forfeiture funds to assemble his own SWAT team. County says it’s powerless to stop him.

In my column this week, I look at some new studies about the long-term effects of mass incarceration, and argue that the criminal justice system is too democratic.

• Another isolated incident.
• Woman investigated for civil rights violations after posting ad for Christian roommate on church bulletin board.
• Photos of Muslims wearing things.
• Primer on early coverage of the latest Wikileaks dump. Abbreviated version: Your government lied to you.
• Here’s a commercial featuring a catapult that launches tiny pies at bugs.
• I’m tired of these motherfucking crocodiles on this motherfucking plane.
• This Randy Quaid stuff is really, really strange.
• Fallout from the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
• David Brooks longs for the days when all sitcoms were about families. He’s right. It was a simpler, more wholesome era of  television. It was also an era that only existed in David Brooks’ mind. I’m sure he’ll find a way to blame libertarians for this.
• Vintage photos of the New York City Subway.

It was under their nose all along.

Picking up the chemical signature of those bombs should be relatively straightforward — just a matter of picking up the stray molecules that float away from unstable explosive material. In practice, it hasn’t been so easy. In 1997, a young program manager at Darpa launched the “Dog’s Nose” progam, to develop a bomb-sniffer as good as a canine’s. Today, that program manager, Regina Dugan, runs the entire agency.

It’s now 2010. What have they found?

Drones, metal detectors, chemical sniffers, and super spycams — forget ‘em. The leader of the Pentagon’s multibillion military task force to stop improvised bombs says there’s nothing in the U.S. arsenal for bomb detection more powerful than a dog’s nose.

Despite a slew of bomb-finding gagdets, the American military only locates about 50 percent of the improvised explosives planted in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that number jumps to 80 percent when U.S. and Afghan patrols take dogs along for a sniff-heavy walk. “Dogs are the best detectors,” Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the commander of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, told a conference yesterday, National Defense reports. That’s not the greatest admission for a well-funded organization — nearly $19 billion since 2004, according to a congressional committee — tasked with solving one of the military’s wickedest problems.

Seems like $19 billion would have bought and trained a lot of dogs.

CORRECTION: The $19 billion figure is DARPA’s entire budget since 2004, not the amount of money allocated to Dog’s Nose.

• I like this guy.
• Walgreens has announced that it will soon provide a photo recovery service. Doesn’t say if they’ll do video too, but  it’sworth noting should someone ever delete important, possibly-of-evidentiary-value data from your cell phone.
• Pace University football player shot, killed by police. Witness statements appear to contradict police accounts of the incident.
• Parents Television Council says GQ photos of TV actors in their 20s is an appeal to pedophiles.
• “Gagneux has spent many hours fashioning devices to coax sperm from chimpanzees.”
• Stupid Season update: Rush Limbaugh complains about George Soros’ foreign money in U.S. politics. Except that Soros is a U.S. citizen. On the other side, I always hear that Rachel Maddow isn’t your typical partisan cable news host. This seems pretty typical.
• Accounts of botched drug raids sound so much more pleasant when they’re written in British.
• Among things government might regulate that I’d classify as “not tyranny…..”

Slate‘s Will Saletan echoes Matt Welch, and also makes a convincing argument that the Juan Williams fiasco bears a resemblance to the Shirley Sherrod debacle—as with Sherrod, partisans took video of Williams talking about overcoming his own biases deliberately out of context to make him look like a bigot.*

Meanwhile, over at the “glibertarian”-baiting Balloon Juice blog, in a post defending NPR for firing Williams over insensitive comments, “business and economics editor” DougJ calls Williams a lawn jockey,with no apparent sense of irony. He later added a strike-through and changed the insult to stooge, but it’s clear from his responses in the comments thread (at least as of this writing) that he isn’t particularly apologetic about his initial choice of words.

More interesting, DougJ’s post defends NPR’s actions not just because of Williams’ comments about Muslims, but because in DougJ’s opinion, Williams’ political views are too conservative for Williams’ race and NPR affiliation, thus giving black-guy-from-NPR-approved cover for the Fox News hate machine.* Hence, “lawn jockey.”

Which brings me to the Clarence Thomas Rule.* It goes something like this: When a black person expresses views that liberal elites have deemed unacceptable for black people to hold, it is permissible for good liberals to respond by implying that said black person is either too stupid or too corrupt to think for himself, and to then call that black person racist names. In fact, not only are both responses permissible and not racist, they are a recommended way of displaying your open-mindedness.

(*Obligatory disclaimers: I defended Shirley Sherrod from what I thought was a shameless smear. I find much of Fox News unwatchable (and MSNBC, for that matter). I think the Williams firing was ridiculous, but I also disagree with Williams on a host of issues, including some of the opinions he expressed on that particular episode of O’Reilly. I think Clarence Thomas has ruled correctly on some issues in his time as a Supreme Court justice, incorrectly on others. I do not think that he is stupid.)

• Partisanship and fear of government. Or, “if only we had the right people in charge….”
• Great post from Ta-Nehisi Coates on the “culture of poverty”.
• Former cop now activist who records other misbehaving cops.
• Texas man exonerated after 27 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit.
• Big business, the Koch empire, and free markets.
• Former NFL player protests what he says was rough treatment from cop by challenging the cop to an MMA fight.
• Bumper sticker for space nerds.
• The Amazing Elastic Commerce Clause.

• NPR fires Juan Williams for saying he fears Muslims when he’s at the airport.
• MIT scientist building machine to determine whether or not we’re living in a hologram.
• Fun with headline double-entendres.
• Report: Bell, California public officials used low-income housing funds for personal slush fund.
• Depaul University refuses to recognize student group that advocates marijuana legalization.
• Pretty much par for the course when it comes to DHS policy.
• Last month, Washington State’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on online poker, which puts playing online in the same class of crimes as child molestation, arson, and kidnapping. Here’s reaction from a poker player who recently moved there.