• Pretty soon, they’re just going to ban cold medicine altogether. It’s the price we must pay to keep people from getting high. One of the prices, anyway.
• Rolling Stone slobbers all over Obama. As I’ve pointed out before,  Obama has been quick compromise on campaign promises that limit government or hold it more accountable, but held firm to his principles on issues that expand the scope and power of government. Also interesting how the historians and talking heads interviewed for the article say Obama will be considered great simply for the fact that he’s “getting things done”. Never mind that we have no idea if the things he’s gotten done will actually work.
• Think this worked?
• Accountability in the military vs. accountability in domestic police departments. One has it, one doesn’t.
• My drunk driving column has been pretty warmly received. Pleasantly surprised at this.
• Student finds FBI tracking device on his car. FBI demands it back.
• I haven’t covered the plight of Mississippi sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott, mostly because I have more than enough Mississippi material to keep me busy. But here’s a good summary of their case. And yes, it’s pretty outrageous.
• Police chief wants to issue fines for leaving car doors unlocked.
• Massachusetts prosecutors say defense attorneys get too much money. Check the comments for some counter arguments.

I’ve posted a lengthy appreciation over at Hit & Run.

Here’s a very funny Vice interview with the man who mastered Sim City, the urban planning computer game.

The Consumerist sets the interview up.

Vincent Ocasla says that in fashioning the “Magnasanti” metropolis, he has “beaten” SimCity by creating the max stable population of six million. It consists of four grids of identical 12 x 12 grids with everyone’s workplace within walking distance. There are no roads, the city runs entirely on subways. There’s zero abandoned buildings zero congestion, and zero water pollution. 

Sounds utopic! But wait…

Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place….

…The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

Also, no one lives past the age of 50. Bright side: Low health care expenditures!

• Senator gets high in the D.C. suburbs, urinates in public, has to be taken in for medical care.
• Dem group attacks Rand Paul for being “soft on crime.”
• Great photoset of Washington, D.C. from the 1980s.
• Think twice before calling the police.
• This is the part where she comes to life, dons a cape, then goes about restoring constitutionally-limited government.
• L.A. Weekly blogger manages to show off ethnic bigotry and economic ignorance in a single post about Prop 19. Here’s a good explanation of how he can’t even get his stereotypes correct.

Alex Knapp flags this paragraph from a New York Times profile of Muslim-baiting blogger Pamela Geller.

She spent the next year educating herself about Islam, reading Bat Ye’or, a French writer who focuses on tensions over Muslim immigrants in Europe; Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym for a Pakistani who writes about his rejection of Islam; and Daniel Pipes, whom she ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of a moderate Islam.

Knapp responds:

This is grotesque to me. It’s like saying that that someone spent a year educating themselves about Christianity, reading Chrisopher Hitchens, an English writer who wrote articles focusing on the “crimes against humanity” of Mother Teresa, Friedrich Nietzsche, a former seminary student who wrote at length about his rejection of Christianity, and Sam Harris, whom they ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of moderate Christianity.

If you put that in a profile of an anti-Christian blogger, you would know immediately that they’re a fraud and simply not worth listening to.

If you want to listen the fruits of Geller’s self-education, check out her interview with 60 Minutes from a few weeks ago. Note, though, that after the interview, Geller helpfully provided some important context in which to watch the segment: 60 Minutes “is part of the Islamic supremacist agenda.”

My all-time favorite Geller moment is still the time she published proof that Barack Obama is the illegetimate love child of Malcolm X. (She now disclaims the theory, but says she published it because “the writer did a spectacular job documenting Obama’s many connections with the Far Left.”)

Geller would be easy to dismiss and not take seriously . . . if it weren’t for the fact that a distubring and growing number of people take her seriously.

Wonderfully obtuse line from Time’s scare story about militias:

“In a reversal of casting, the armed antigovernment movement describes itself as heir to the founders.”

Not sure which I like better, the historical ignorance or the cutesy, condescending way the writer demonstrates his ignorance in the course of exposing what he thinks is the ignorance of the militia groups he’s writing about.

(Note: It is possible to think Time is being silly and scaremongery in this piece without also endorsing the beliefs of the few militia groups and nutjobs who do, in fact, advocate violence as a form of dissent.)

Via my colleague Jesse Walker, who has more on the piece.

At least that’s what the A.P. is reporting.

I haven’t yet heard who got the job.

Remember that Pennsylvania school that was spying on its students through their laptop computers? The school has agreed to pay out a $610,000 settlement.

But check out how that figure breaks down:

The settlement calls for $175,000 to be placed in a trust for Robbins and $10,000 for a second student who filed suit, Jalil Hassan. Their lawyer, Mark Haltzman, will get $425,000 for his work on the case.

So public school officials get caught illegally spy on students. But no one gets fired. And none of the offending parties will be fined. Instead, a municipal insurer (which will ultimately affect taxpayers) will pay a decent settlement to one student, a small settlement to another, and a small fortune to their lawyer.

• Rogue taxidermy!
• New York magazine looks at false confessions.
• “Ah, listening to a live band while eating a meal in a gynecologist’s exam room—now there’s a multi-orifice experience few other restaurants can match!”
• I like my Onion just a little bit twisted.
• The politics of bicycle helmets.
• Correction of the week.
• If you have to ask . . . you probably shouldn’t ask.

So asks Jill Lepore at the New York Times:

To the campaign to make “progressive” a slur, Wilson is useful. Much as many people admire aspects of his presidency, he has no natural constituency any more, right or left. He was opposed to female suffrage. He supported Jim Crow. He wrote about Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy. He makes a good bad guy. He was also an intellectual, the first U.S. president to hold a Ph.D., and not just any intellectual: he had a law degree, but, before he became president, he was an American historian, with a special interest in constitutional history.

This professor-president has convenient similarities to our current chief executive — a scholar of constitutional law, professorial, intellectual, even, in some people’s eyes, effete (as, for instance, T.R. and F.D.R. were not). Also, given that Tea Party populism, at least as represented by remarks made by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin over the last two years, is dedicated to the proposition that American history — the very study of the nation’s past — has been stolen by elitist, leftist intellectuals, discrediting Wilson, broadly, as an intellectual and, specifically, as an American historian, is tactical.

Finally, of course, Wilson was indeed a progressive; he pursued progressive policies, and nominated progressives like Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, targeting Wilson is, to some degree not only arbitrary but also counter-intuitive; much that he wrote aligns very well with today’s far right (“America was born a Christian nation,” Wilson once said).

I can’t speak for Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, or conservatives, but I’m not the least bit bothered by the fact that Wilson was an intellectual (it’s the content of his academic writing that I find objectionable), and I don’t really think he has all that much in common with Obama. But while the animus toward Wilson from the right is relatively new, or at least more pronounced than it’s been in the past, Wilson has always drawn the ire of libertarians. Among the many reasons why:

• He dishonestly led us into a pointless, costly, destructive war, and assumed control over huge sectors of the economy to wage it. He seized railroads, food and energy production, and implemented price controls.
• He suppressed dissent and imprisoned war critics. Said Wilson, “Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” He signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the latter of which made it a criminal offense to “oppose the cause of the United States.” He retaliated against critical newspapers, and directed the U.S. Postal Service to stop delivering mail determined to be critical of the war effort.
• Wilson not only continued existing racial segregation of federal government workers, he extended it.
• He instituted the first military draft since the Civil War.
• He signed the first federal drug prohibition.
• He reinstituted the federal income tax.

A few more, from Gene Healy’s book, The Cult of the Presidency:

• Wilson believed in an activist, imperialist presidency. In his 1909 book Constitutional Government, he made the case against checks and balances and the separation of powers. The government, Wilson argued, is a living organism, and “no living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.”
• He ordered unconstitutional, unilateral military interventions into Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. (He also oversaw military interventions in Panama and Cuba, and instituted American-favored dictators throughout Latin America.)
• Wilson believed God ordained him to be president, and acted accordingly, boasting to one friend in 1913 that “I have been smashing precedents almost daily every since I got here.” Every president since Jefferson had given the State of the Union in writing. Wilson reinstituted what Jefferson derided as the “speech from the Throne,” and ordered Congress assembled to hear him speak, giving rise to the embarrassing spectacle the SOTU has become today.
• He oversaw a massive domestic spying program, and encouraged American citizens to report one another for subversion.

Lepore is correct that some of these libertarian objections are actually points of similarity between Wilson and modern conservatives. But I think a more interesting question than Why does the right hate Wilson? is, given all of this, along with his belief in white racial superiority and opposition to women’s suffrage, why do presidential historians seem to like him so much? Similarly, why do historians seem to be most smitten with the presidents who most exceed their constitutional authority?

I make the case for doing so in this week’s crime column.

I promise to share any resulting hate mail.

• Roman helmet found in field makes British farmer a millionaire.
• The corpses of Mt. Everest. “Green Boots” is fairly haunting.
• China cracks down on intellectuals after Liu Xiaob’s Nobel Peace Prize award. His wife is also apparently missing.
• Total = 10,440.
• This one ought to keep you busy in the comments for a while. What a mess.

I’ll post a fuller appreciation of my favorite soul singer later this afternoon. In the meantime, enjoy this beautiful rendition of “Valley of Tears” with Gillian Welch. And huge thanks to the great Joe Henry for resurrecting Burke’s career back in 2000. Had Henry not produced Don’t Give Up on Me, performances like the one below would probably never have happened.

Cook County, Illinois:

An elderly couple says Cook County sheriff’s police on a drug raid smashed into their Southwest Side house late Thursday night, terrorizing them before admitting they had the wrong house.

With her husband already asleep, 84-year-old Anna Jakymek was just turning out the lights when she heard loud noises at the back and front doors about 11:30 p.m.

Her initial thought was that her 89-year old husband had fallen out of bed, but she realized something else was happening when she looked into the front room.

“I see maybe 20 guys come in and see the door knocked open,” she said…

Son Andrew said the most potent drug in the home is aspirin.

“They don’t smoke, drink or even watch TV. They believe in America,” he said.

He added that his father, Andrij, suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease and has terminal cancer.

“He won’t even take pain medicine,” he said…

His mother, he said, called him after the raid at the request of the supervising sergeant on the scene. When he got there, he said he was told the officers had raided the wrong home.

“When I arrived the officer explained they had misinformation, but said his job was over, and he was leaving. They left a copy of the warrant, but he absolved himself of any responsibility for the raid or the damage,” Andrew Jakymec said.

He estimated the damage to broken doors, locks and windows at up to $3,000.

“Everything was violently opened. Cabinets were ripped open, clothes and sheets were everywhere, and pieces of wood where the doors were rammed were all over the place,” he said.

Bonus points: The Jakymeks emigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine in the 1960s in order to escape Soviet oppression.

• The Nobel Peace Prize committee gets one right.
• 72,000 dead people received $18 million in federal stimulus money.
• I am shocked that an American president might exaggerate the threat of terrorism for political purposes.
• Cracked explains the science behind Lord Acton’s famous quote.
• A disturbing case from Judge Talmadge “Say the Pledge or You’re Going to Jail” Littlejohn’s days as a prosecutor.
• Conservative icons Brent Bozell and Richard Viguerie come out in opposition to the death penalty.
• DOT Sec. Ray LaHood now pushing for a complete ban on cell phones in cars. He’s also targeting OnStar and Sync.
• Excellent dissection of the latest government scare study about “binge drinking.” Just absurd that the NIAA now defines a “binge” as drinking until your BAC hits .08.

….a federal judge has just ruled that the federal government can force me to purchase a product from a private company, under the argument that my not purchasing that product affects interstate commerce.

For those of you who support this ruling: Under an interpretation of the Commerce Clause that says the federal government can regulate inactivity, can you name anything at all that the feds wouldn’t have the power to regulate?

And if you can’t (and let’s face it, you can’t), why was the Constitution written in the first place? As I understand it, the whole point was to lay out a defined set of federal powers, divided among the three branches, with the understanding that the powers not specifically enumerated in the document are retained by the states and the people.

But if that set of powers includes everything you do (see Wickard and Raich), and everything you don’t do (what Obamacare proponents are advocating here), what’s the point in having a Constitution at all?

Gay Republicans who rail against gays, lefty pols who push for high tax rates then don’t bother to pay their own taxes, and now . . . the country’s most famous immigrant basher . . . employed illegal immigrants.

Also, I’m a deep cover DEA agent and part-time member of my local SWAT team.

• Friend of liberty, Reason contributor Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• A map of the wired world.
• Skyscraper interrupted. Some of these are/would have been stunning. Sad that the graceful Chicago Spire isn’t happening, but the hulking, awkward Trump Tower was completed.
• The high cost of state income taxes.
• How do I get a freelance writing gig like this? Think I’m going to pitch a story to Slate on how to take the most expensive vacation possible.
• Archeologists find Bronze Age cities buried in the Russian steppe.
• Brooklyn Democratic pol coerced drug addicts to help him campaign.
• Federal employees found at religious-themed motivational conference during work hours.

I have a feeling this story will soon be national news. From the NMissCommentor, a legal blog in Mississippi:

[Attorney] Danny Lampley . . . was jailed by Chancery Court Judge Littlejohn in Tupelo for failing to recite the pledge of allegiance in open court today.  Danny was one of the local lawyers who represented the plaintiff in the Pontotoc school prayer case years ago, working with the ACLU and People for the American Way.

I’m informed that Danny rose and was respectful, but did not recite the pledge…

The order incarcerating him provides:

BE IT REMEMBERED, this date, the Court having ordered all present in the courtroom to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegience, and having found that Danny Lampley, Attorney at Law, failed and refused to do so, finds said Danny Lampley to be in criminal contempt of court.

The order states that for this, Danny Lampley “is hereby ordered to be incaraerated in that Lee County jail.” The order continues:

IT IS FURTHER ORDED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED, that Danny Lampley shall purge himself of said criminal contempt by complying with the order of this Court by standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in open court.

I’d say it’s time Judge Littlejohn turned in his robe. This is just astonishingly ignorant, arrogant, and thuggish. Oh, and illegal. It’s also way illegal. Like, not even close.

A New Mexico narcotics task force sent a SWAT team and helicopter to raid a school where students “participate in farming as a context for learning mathematics and science.” The raid was apparently part of a larger operation involving the task force, the state police, and the National Guard, in which cops conduct aerial sweeps of rural areas in search of marijuana grows.

“We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.” 

After 15 minutes, Pantano said, the helicopter left, then five minutes later a state police officer parked a van in the school’s driveway. Pantano said she asked the officer what was happening, but he only would say he was there as a law-enforcement representative. 

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum. 

“As we have nothing to hide, you know, they did the tour and they went in the greenhouses and they found it was tomato plants and so that was the story,” she said. 

Quite the show of force to make sure the school’s 12 students, ages 11 to 14, weren’t secretly hiding pot plants among their tomatoes. Or maybe the problem was that the cops mistook the tomatoes for pot. That’s happened before, too.

Red meat for the comments section:

• Missouri Tea Party and Joe the Plumber team up to oppose a ballot initiative that would impose regulations on abusive puppy mills.
• Tennessee firefighters watch house burn to the ground because owner didn’t pay $75 assessment for homeowners in rural areas.

I’ve admitted in the past to being a property rights squish when it comes to the gratuitous abuse of animals, though I do think animal abuse laws should be as local as possible. That said, even if in principle you believe puppy mill owners have the right to run abusive puppy mills, it’s a strange and tone-deaf cause for the Missouri Tea Party to take up. Of all that’s going on right now, you’re going to make this a priority?

I’m still not sure what I think about the second story. My colleague Nick Gillespie weighs in here. Interested in what you Agitatortots think.

More here.

Also, kudos to the protesters for uploading the video to YouTube.

• NYPD cop refuses to give CPR to 11-year-old having an asthma attack. She died. He has been suspended.
• Fashion critic shoots teenager in the ass for wearing saggy pants.
• The Washington Times gives Larry Kudlow some competition for “most ridiculous Obama criticism of the week.”
• Four decades after seizing hundreds of homes and businesses for a useless highway, city of Baltimore will demolish the road, put up parking garages.
• DOJ coerces credit card companies to allow merchants to charge lower prices for using cards with lower fees. American Express holds out. DOJ now suing American Express for antitrust violations. Result: You can probably kiss your rewards program goodbye within a few years.
• iPad now the fastest selling gadget ever.
• Federal judge charged with buying drugs from a stripper.
• Fascinating little slideshow: The Net Worth of the U.S. Presidents.
• Cell phone justice in Afghanistan.
• Sen. Jim DeMint: Gays and women who have premarital sex should be barred from classrooms.

In my last column, I wrote about a USA Today study finding more than 200 examples of misconduct among prosecutors in the federal criminal justice system, of which only one faced any serious sanction. (The paper ran a follow-up last week which found that even when the suspect is eventually cleared of all charges in these cases, he still faces massive legal bills, often goes bankrupt, and is rarely reimbursed for his expenses.)

A new study of state prosecutors in California out this week comes to similar conclusions. The Northern California Innocence Project reviewed 4,000 cases between 1997 and 2009 and found prosecutorial misconduct in 707 of them (though they caution that this may underestimate the problem). In only six of those cases were prosecutors sanctioned by the California Bar. I wrote about one of those cases. The prosecutor’s boss, Santa Clara County District Attorney Delores Carr, responded by attempting to strip the state bar’s ability to discipline prosecutors.

This latest study again confirms what we’ve seen in similar reviews: prosecutors are almost never sanctioned for misconduct, even egregious violations that lead to wrongful convictions.

Both studies are worth keeping in mind in the coming months as the Supreme Court again considers the degree to which prosecutors should be shielded from civil liability.