I’ll be giving two speeches at the Missouri NORML conference this weekend. I’ll talk about the drug war’s collateral damage at Friday, Nov. 5th at 5:30 pm, and I’ll speak about police militarization on Saturday Nov. 6th at 4:00 pm.

Both speeches will be in the auditorium of the Arts and Science building at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and both are free and open to the public.

• The science of libertarian morality. Most of this rings true.
• Arizona picks Arpaio acolyte, immigration hawk Russel Pearce to head state senate.
• Damn You, Autocorrect!
• Patrick at Popehat notes another encouraging defeat of a bad sheriff in Tuesday’s election.
• On the other hand, Democracy still has its problems.
• Dear Republicans: This would be your first huge mistake.
• This speaks volumes.
• Stalin would have been proud.

There were a couple of results from last night that Agitator readers should find encouraging.

The first was the reelection of Dallas County, Texas, District Attorney Craig Watkins. It was close, but it looks like Watkins pulled it out. Watkins is a former defense attorney who in 2006 took over one of the most notoriously ruthless DA offices in the country. He’s also the first African-American DA in Texas history. Watkins set up a special unit within DA’s office whose sole charge was to find innocent people who had been convicted by the prosecutors who previously occupied the office. It’s probably of no coincidence, then, that Dallas County leads every county in the country (and most states) in exonerations. Watson actually had critics, who argued that it wasn’t a prosecutors job to free the wrongly convicted. So it was good to see Dallas voters give him their approval, if only by a slim margin. (Read my interview with Watkins here.)

The other encouraging news from last night is that Colorado voters soundly rejected judges Terence Gilmore and Jolene Blair. Gilmore and Blair were reprimanded by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2008 for withholding exculpatory evidence while they were prosecutors. That withheld evidence helped them convict Timothy Masters of a crime he didn’t commit. While Masters served a decade in prison, Gimore and Blair were promoted to judge. The reprimand and finding that they convicted an innocent man did not preclude them from sitting on the bench, where they presided over criminal cases.

Voters stepped in where the system failed. Masters’ family and supporters started a campaign to get the two removed from the bench. Of the eight judges up for retention in Colorado’s 8th Judicial District, only Blair and Gilmore were rejected, and both were rejected by at least 60 percent of voters. The other six judges were retained with at least 70 percent of the vote. It’s pretty clear that the Masters case is why they lost.

In an age when there’s far too little accountability for misbehaving prosecutors, Gilmore and Blair got some belated comeuppance. More of this, please.

More fun at last weekend’s rally.

• Obama administration cheers Prop 19′s defeat. Assholes.
• Meanwhile, there’s yet more evidence that Portugal’s decriminalization efforts have been a success.
• John Cole is upset about Russ Feingold’s defeat (for the record, I am too). So he blames . . . Reason magazine.  Sure, John. That makes perfect sense. Have another drink.
• Memos detail TSA officer’s hilarious antics of planting fake cocaine on passengers, then chuckling at the terrified looks on their faces. Note that only one coworker turned him in. Prior stories also pointed out how we weren’t permitted to know how this particular worker was disciplined, thanks to the privacy protections afforded to federal employees. Good to know that as TSA workers go through your bags, pat you down, and gaze at your naked body, the government will protect their privacy should they do something inappropriate.
• Virgin snake has 22 offspring. I’m sure there’s a sacrilegious joke in here somewhere.

Canadian poker pro Terrence Chan has twice been turned away at the U.S. border by customs officials. He describes the first time, a week ago Thursday:

After an hour of waiting, I made it to the front, where I was asked the usual questions. Where do I live? What do I do for work? What is the purpose of my trip? How long will I be there? I answered every question with what would turn out to be the worst possible answer — the truth. I told them that I am a professional poker player with rental property in Hong Kong and Vancouver, and that I was going down to train martial arts for two months, including participating in a major tournament. I made it very clear I had no plans to stay in the United States past December.

They told me to sit down.

About 30 minutes later, I was asked another round of questions. These questions from the same officer were much more accusatory. How could I prove I wasn’t trying to stay in the states indefinitely? What ties do I have to Canada? What ties do I have to Hong Kong? What assurances can you give that you will leave the US? I answered that I own property outside of the US that I have to manage, that all my family lives outside of Canada, that I have poker sponsorship opportunities awaiting me in the Asia-Pacific region.

“But none of these things prove that you will leave the U.S.”

I was told to sit back down, and waited for another 30 minutes. I was then called up again, taken to the back, fingerprinted, and told to sit back down.

They denied him entry. Yesterday Chan tried again, this time armed with a mountain of paperwork.

They went through every piece of paperwork I had and found something wrong with it in one way or another. I had last month’s internet bill in Vancouver and my electric bill in Hong Kong; they now told me I needed six months of bills. They said I needed credit card statements with activity to prove I was spending time in those places. They said I needed a job with pay stubs, and they said that that job had to be where I was physically present, such that it would not be possible for me to do it in the States. They didn’t like that my plane ticket from Vancouver to Hong Kong was only for two months, even though neither of those places is in the United States. He even tried to twist my words of “I’m going to train martial arts” as meaning that I was going to work illegally. “If you don’t have a visa for that, you can’t come in.”

Quite simply, they never had any intent of letting me in the country, no matter what I showed, said, or did. There is no conceivable way that I could have convinced them otherwise. I was fingerprinted again and once again shown the door…

I am a law-abiding, honest, wealthy and mobile Canadian who wanted to come for two months, rent a property, buy groceries, pay fees to a school, spend money on entertainment, and leave.

For this, I get treated like a criminal. Well, no more. I’m done with the United States.

• New Haven mayor agrees that maybe it was a bad idea to use a SWAT team for an underage drinking inspection. I guess that’s a start.
• This Onion piece could almost be a straightforward news story.
• Slate looks at Senate “vanity walls.”
• Little Billy’s Letters to Famous People.
• The New York Times on the Siobhan Reynolds case.
• Federal prosecutors in Washington State look to seize assets of online payment service that works with poker sites. Good to Obama’s DOJ has straightened out the priorities of the previous administration.

Suspicious box of kittens shuts down a highway. Though as a dog person, I’d argue that cats may actually pose a greater threat to our way of life than terrorists.

One of Washington’s Wise Old Davids, in this case Broder, just wants you to know:

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected.

Phew! Exept that he kind of is. After running down a list of things Obama can’t control to save his presidency, Broder comes upon the one thing he can.

What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

….the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

But just so we’re clear, Broder is not advocating that Obama start a war with Iran. He’s just saying that if Obama did, it would probably help the economy. This is a very obvious point, as evidenced by the age of milk and honey ushered in by the last decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also, Broder might add, as an aside really, that Iran is also “the greatest threat to the world.” And one more thing. Eradicating that threat would make Obama, like, one of the best presidents ever.

So Iran is evil. And dispelling that evil through war would make us richer, safer, and make Obama a great man. But Broder is not suggesting that any of this happen. Of course not. Because that would be crass.

If Broder is one of the wise old men of Washington, the city could stand to be a bit dumber.

I’ve noted in the past on this site that I am an exceptionally good napper. I can time my naps to correspond to my nap window. Twenty minutes until I need to be somewhere? I can knock out and wake back up refreshed. An hour? I can stretch out, then pop up in 55 minutes. I’m also quite good at pulling off to a rest stop when tired while driving, grabbing a few winks, then getting back on the road revitalized.

Unfortunately, there’s very little marketability for this skill, other than that it usually provides for more productive afternoons. That is, until now:

Amid the bustle of a shopping mall, with babies wailing and pop music piped in overhead, clutches of people tried to snooze Thursday in what was billed as Spain’s first siesta competition.

The goal — to promote Spain’s cherished post-luncheon nap — is no joke, although the costumes of some who participated may be.

As the nine-day snooze Olympiad got under way, some competitors snuggled with giant stuffed animals or clutched pillows like babies with comforters. Others wore airplane eye masks to block the light. A young stern-faced judge with a T-shirt bearing the letters “ZZZ” monitored the proceedings perched high on a lifeguard’s chair.

Contestants in groups of five were given 20 minutes to lie down on garish blue coaches and timed by a doctor with a pulse-measuring device to determine how long they spent snoozing. They could win extra points for snoring, adopting goofy sleep positions or wearing outlandish night wear in plain view of gawking shoppers.

Their sofas were lined up in parallel numbered lanes like those of a track and field meet, and eight rounds were being held per day.

Top prize was $1,400.

My column this week looks at media bias and the near-uniform opposition to Prop 19 by California newspaper. I argue that contra conservatives, the media isn’t liberal, it’s statist.

• Here is a compilation of people doing awesome things, set to cheesy music.
• Five safety measures that don’t make you safer. I’ve heard skepticism about sunscreen before, but is it really that useless?
• Rock Band gradually becoming more like a real rock band. Next edition rumored to come with petty infighting and starter heroin.
• Woman arrested, charged for refusing to hand found wallet over to the police. But it isn’t because she wanted to keep it. She had apparently had a bad prior experience involving police and stolen property and wanted to first make sure the owner was okay with them making the transfer.
• Esquire‘s list of “Best Members of Congress” is pretty well done. We’re obviously grading on a generous curve here, but the names they picked are largely the better members of either party, and except for a couple, Esquire picked them for the right reasons. I can’t complain about the “worst” list either. But that’s a much easier list to make.
• The full Larry Sanders Show finally released on DVD. Jeffrey Tambor is on my list of 10 funny people with whom I’d like to have a beer.
• Not your ordinary “megachurch leaders comes out of the closet” story. In fact, this one is in encouraging. (UPDATE: Link fixed.)
• Heard a segment on NPR the other day in which there was much lamenting over how unenthusiastic Latino voters seem to be, and how this could make things worse for the Democrats tomorrow. I’m thinking that the Obama administration boasting about its record number of deportations might have something to do with the dampened energy.