• Haley Barbour frees the Scott sisters, but on the (probably unconstitutional) condition that one donate a kidney to the other. Glad Barbour did the right thing, even if he almost certainly did it to save his own ass. At this rate, Cory Maye is only a couple racially insensitive Haley Barbour comments away from a pardon.
• Huge and fascinating map of American English dialects.
• Vote for the police misconduct video of the year. (On Monday, you’ll be able to vote here for our annual Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.)
• Fifty great headlines from the past year. Number 13 is particularly racy. (Sorry. Last bad pun of the year!)

Here’s an incredible Nashville band I saw a couple weeks ago. Not sure this video fully does them justice. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a bigger sound from a two-piece band, and that would include both the White Stripes and the Black Keys.

The band is the Cold Stares. The song is “Brother James”.

In November of last year I wrote a column about Nick Cheolas, a bright kid who was motivated by his own family’s run-in with the criminal justice system to go to law school. There he joined the University of Michigan’s Innocence Clinic, where he helped win the release of Dwayne Provience, a man wrongly convicted of murder in 2000.

Last October, I posted the bad news that Cheolas had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Cheolas now reports on his blog that his cancer is in remission.

Great news. Congratulations to Nick and his family.

“Ken” at Popehat, himself a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, reacts to the government’s silencing of pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds:

Let me pause and offer you a dark confession. I miss the grand jury. When I want documents or evidence now as a criminal defense attorney, I have to ask the government for it, wait for them to laugh and refuse, and then run to court and try to convince a judge to order the government to abide by its obligations. As a civil litigant, I have to write long, complicated demands for documents and information, wait a month for a response, get a response refusing most of what I asked for, engage in a letter-writing campaign, and eventually go to court seeking an order making the other side give me the documents, often months later.

Oh, to use the grand jury again! As a federal prosecutor, I could just issue grand jury subpoenas. I could refuse extensions at my whim. I could ask for whatever the hell I wanted based on the most remote suspicion that it might be relevant to a federal investigation. I could demand compliance with confidence, knowing that it is extraordinarily rare for a federal court to grant a target’s motion to quash or limit a subpoena. And I could do all of this under the ridiculous fiction that I was acting on behalf of a grand jury so long as, occasionally, I stepped into the grand jury room and had a federal agent testify briefly that “Hey, we’ve got an investigation going into [vague subject], we issued subpoenas in your name, we got these documents, the investigation continues.” 99% of the time, the grand jurors wouldn’t look up from their newspapers, hoping they’d get let out early that day. Were the grand jurors a check on government abuse of the subpoena power? Don’t make me laugh until I throw up.

• U.S. officials shocked that Mexico’s deployment of 50,000 troops to fight its drug war—undertaken at our urging, by the way—has resulted in carnage, but only made the drug cartels more powerful. They’ll be shocked next time it happens, too.
• Worry of being penetrated by gays causes conservatives to pull out.
• My colleague Jesse Walker continues his year-end tradition of listing his favorite movies of the year, but from years past.
• Gene Healy: the five worst op-ed of 2010. I’d throw in this Bill Clinton disaster.
• Julian Sanchez and Christopher Beam talk about libertarianism.
• Man firing crossbow at a target in his yard causes 20 cops to converge on his home, arrest him, seize his wife, daughter inside.

When I first read about this clip, I figured Carlson was just being droll. But not only hasn’t he walked the comment below back, but The Daily Caller is promoting the clip on its front page. Which is to say that The Daily Caller is trumpeting the idea that its founder believes the government should kill a man because he was cruel to his animals.

For the record, I’m a dog lover. I’m okay with state laws against dog fighting. (And I realize and concede this is probably inconsistent with general libertarian philosophy.) I don’t think Vick should have been prosecuted federally. I also think he’s done his time, has made his amends, and I have no problem being happy about his redemption and rooting on his success. Unless he’s playing the Colts.

All of that out of the way, Carlson is absolutely out of his mind on this. Seems like the way conservatives show they’re serious about an issue these days is by calling for someone to be executed.

When it was announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had commuted the sentence of Brian Aitken, the man sentenced to seven years in prison for carrying a gun in the trunk of his car—even though he appears to have done everything he could to comply with the state’s unfortunate gun laws—there was some speculation in the comments here at Hit & Run and elsewhere around the web as to why Christie didn’t grant Aitken a full pardon.

I spoke with Evan Nappen, Aitken’s attorney, about that today. Nappen actually didn’t ask Christie for a full pardon, which he says would have been premature while the conviction is still being appealed. It also would have been a more difficult petition to win. Nappen says his primary interest was to get Aitken out of prison and home for the holidays. He’ll now work to get the conviction overturned on appeal, preferably with a ruling that strikes down or at least clarifies New Jersey’s gun laws and prevents similar arrests and prosecutions in the future. Nappen says that while he thinks Aitken’s chances of having the conviction overturned are good, if he is not successful he can always go back and ask Christie to clear his record once he has exhausted his appeals.

CORRECTION: Fixed a brain lapse typo mistaking New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie with ex-NBA player Doug Christie. Will no longer blog with SportsCenter on in the background.

Congrats to Dan Bragnaca (check out his blog here), winner of this year’s TheAgitator.com fantasy football league.

If you’re wondering, I finished second to last. Damn Ryan Grant, my first-round pick, had a season-ending injury in week one. Also, my team had some problems with locker room chemistry.

Wanted to say thanks for the kind wish list gifts I’ve received over the holidays.

Amazon doesn’t always include an email or address, so if I can’t otherwise get back to you, it’s much appreciated. Always amazes and thrills me to get a random gift from someone I’ve never met because they like the work I do.

Siobhan Reynolds, on Facebook:

[V]ery sad to be announcing the closure of Pain Relief Network. The government and the federal judiciary have succeeded in silencing the lone organized effort on behalf of tens of millions of American, vets, children, cancer patients, people born with congenital painful conditions who cannot get their pain controlled. Power wins. Suffering humanity, decency itself, and the rule of law lose.

My summary of what led to this here.

So many things wrong with this story:

An athletic and academic standout in Lee County said a lunchbox mix-up has cut short her senior year of high school and might hurt her college opportunities.

Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, was suspended from Southern Lee High School in October after school personnel found a small paring knife in her lunchbox.

Smithwick said personnel found the knife while searching the belongings of several students, possibly looking for drugs…

The lunchbox really belonged to Joe Smithwick, who packs a paring knife to slice his apple. He and his daughter have matching lunchboxes.

“It’s just an honest mistake. That was supposed to be my lunch because it was a whole apple,” he said.

Ashley Smithwick said she had never gotten in trouble before and was surprised when the principal opened her lunchbox and found the knife.

The teen was initially given a 10-day suspension, then received notice that she was suspended the rest of the school year…

This month, Ashley Smithwick, a soccer player who takes college-level courses, was charged with misdemeanor possession of a weapon on school grounds. She is no longer allowed to set foot on campus.

• Planes stranded on tarmac for seven, eight, and 10 hours in NYC.
• The Wikileaks cables . . . as haiku.
• Tennessee lawmakers now debating requiring a prescription for cold meds.
• The junk touchers’ Venn diagram.
• Amazon may have dropped Wikileaks to protect federal contracts.

Here, my friend Dave Weigel responds to my post on Chris Beam’s New York article on libertarianism. (Follow all that?)

A few comments on Dave’s post.

Beam’s “thrashing” is based on what’s happened as the current crop of libertarian politicians have been tested by the electorate, gotten burned, and walked back a little. “Libertarianism and power are like matter and anti-matter,” he argues. Their ideas are never really tested, and when they’re tested, they crumble, because voters like the trains and the Social Security checks to be on time. “Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.”

I suppose that last part is true. We’ll never have a minarchist government. I’m not sure how that’s a failing of libertarianism, though. But there are plenty of libertarian ideas that have been tested, and have worked well. Deregulation of airlines, telecommunications, and trucking in the 1970s, for example. Drug decriminalization in Portugal. Free(r) trade and the decline of protectionism. And generally speaking, the industries that are least regulated and influenced by government have the highest rates of customer satisfaction. The fact that politicians half-assed libertarian ideas like Social Security privatization or electricity deregulation in California doesn’t disprove those ideas.

Beam’s history and etymology are going to be useful to outsiders, who don’t pay attention to this stuff.

I don’t know what Dave means by “useful”. I found some of it to be trite. Not all libertarians cut their teeth on Ayn Rand. I’ve never been much of a fan. She was important in many ways, detrimental in many others. The drug references were a bit too cute, too. Beam’s reference to Somalia was also silly and cliched. Somalia isn’t a libertarian paradise any more than North Korea is a progressive paradise. That is, libertarians don’t advocate the absence of government any more than progressives advocate all-powerful government. We advocate the rule of law. There is no law in Somalia. (That said, the country is still doing better than many of the corruptly run countries that surround it.)

It’s a better case against libertarian policy, if you want that, than a shouty “investigative” blog post at some liberal site that connects a congressman’s staff to the Koch family with the assumption that evil has just been uncovered.

Not sure why it has to be either/or. Beam still couldn’t resist mentioning the Kochs, though it obviously wasn’t the central theme of his article. And yes, his piece was fairer and more respectful to libertarianism than other treatments I’ve seen. And yes, I still had some problems with it.

Do libertarians promise utopia? Sure.

No, they don’t. People use the utopia canard  to make libertarianism seem creepy and cultish. Look, politics is a dirty, corrupt profession that rewards people who display the characteristics you least want in someone in whom you entrust important decisions about your life. The general premise of libertarianism is that people should be free to make their own decisions about their lives—that as much of our lives as possible should be kept within the sphere of civil, voluntary society, and out of the sphere of political society. There would still be problems in a libertarian society. There would still be crime, income inequality, acne, nu metal, and reality TV. Most libertarians merely believe that in a libertarian society, most people would be better off than they are now—that being free to make more of your own choices is preferable to having politicians make them for you. Most conservatives and liberals also believe that most people would be better off if their own policy preferences were implemented. That isn’t in the same ballpark as promising utopia. People will still make bad decisions. They should be free to do so.

If anything is utopian, it’s the idea that the world would be much better off if only we put more of society in the hands of a few very smart people who somehow know all the answers. And that somehow the political process will ensure that those all-knowing people always end up in a position to make all the decisions.

In the 1990s, the new, libertarian-minded Republican congressmen and governors discovered that fast growth allowed them to cut taxes and grow budgets for services that voters liked.

Come on, Dave. There was nothing “libertarian-minded” about Newt Gingrich & Co. Yes, the Contract With America had some language about eliminating a few federal agencies. And those plans were jettisoned almost as soon as the new GOP freshmen were sworn in. The 1990s GOP held firm on a few economic issues that had some culture war resonance (welfare reform, for example), but there were no guiding libertarian principles on display during Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker. They were primarily social conservatives.

• Police officer reinstated, will face no charges after DUI arrest because “the prosecutor in Reno did not turn over the evidence to Goss’ defense attorney in the allotted time.”
• More drug war collateral damage in Mexico.
• The A.P. picks up on the drug decriminalization success story in Portugal.
• I was pretty skeptical of how Sotomayor would come down on criminal justice issues. Happy to report that early reports indicate I was wrong.

Over at Hit & Run, I have a bit more on that Christopher Beam article in New York magazine.

• Video of SWAT Raid on Missouri Family
• Columbia, Missouri Police Chief: “I Hate the Internet”
• Give Thanks for Your Freedom, Son, or I’m Sending You to Jail
• Cable News: Where Being Loud Trumps Being Being Wrong
• Saving Africa’s Witch Children
• Sunday Evening Dog Blogging: Puparrazzi Edition
• Tyranny
• Government, Violence, and Bill Clinton
• In Spite of State Law, Maryland Law Enforcement Officials Still Arresting, Charing People for Recording Cops
• Shut Up and Be Scanned

The Legal Watchdog blog looks at a terrible decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in which it upheld an order for a 17-year-old to register as as sex offender, even though he committed no sex crime. The youth forced another 17-year-old to accompany him to collect a debt. This was enough to convict him of falsely imprisoning a minor, which the Wisconsin legislature has defined as a sex crime.

Scott Greenfield comments:

Of critical importance is that the court did not hold that the purpose of the sex offender registry is in any way directly related to sex, but rather “protecting the public and assisting law enforcement.”  That pretty much covers everything in the world, except releasing Brett Favre when he still had life in his arm.

By decoupling sex from the sex offender registry, there’s no rational end to where legislatures can go.  It’s invariably in the interest of protecting the public and, my personal favorite concern, assisting law enforcement to keep tabs on every person ever convicted of anything, anywhere, any time.  It’s like an “easy button” for law enforcement, and seriously, wouldn’t that make cops’ lives easier?

Wisconsin isn’t the first state to tag people with the sex offender label for crimes unrelated to sex. See the story of Fitzroy Barnaby.

• Redditor asks fellow Redditors to photoshop his 92-year-old grandfather. Fun ensues.
• “About eight of every 10 registered lobbyists who work for scanner-technology companies previously held positions in the government or Congress, most commonly in the homeland security, aviation or intelligence fields…”
• A gift for ophthalmologists.
• Pilot investigated, disarmed for exposing TSA security flaws embarrassing the government.
• Old photos of a man and his pet buffalo.
• I like Chris Beam, but his treatise on libertarianism in New York magazine is, unfortunately, loaded with straw men and caricatures. He doesn’t really consider libertarians’ best arguments, just the versions of them that are easiest to knock down. Wish I had time to get to it in more detail, but I’m sure this will be batted around the web all week.

A reader with outrage fatigue emailed and asked me to post only something happy today. Gladly!

Merry Christmas, Agitatortots. My gift to you: A pile of baby otters.

In honor of our new Internet overlords, here is my favorite FCC protest song.

• Nice story: Google engineer bails out the L.A. teen arrested while recording a police officer.
• Woman arrested for refusing TSA pat-down.
• Ousted congressman sues anti-abortion PAC because attack ads deprived him of his livelihood. It’s almost as if they think they’re entitled to an elected position, isn’t it?
• “Tell Obama I’m coming after his black ass.”
• Cops coming home after military deployment face problems readjusting.
• Video as an architectural element.
• CBN walks back Pat Robertson’s comments about marijuana.

So what surprised me in this post by my colleague Jacob Sullum wasn’t the brutal methods by which the Chinese have enforced the country’s one-child policy. You sort of suspect that a brutal government would enforce an immoral policy by brutal means. What surprised me is that the likes of Ted Turner (five children), Diane Francis (two children), and Thomas Friedman (two children, and who lives in this house), have had nice things to say about the policy.

I guess I knew some fringe environmentalists favored this sort of thing. Had no idea more mainstream personalities did. I mean, Jesus. What horrible, horrible human beings.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

…it’s my impression that much of cable news is rigged. Complicated questions are forced into small spaces of time, and guests frequently dissemble in order to score debate points and avoid being intellectually honest. Finally, many of the guests don’t seem to be actual experts in the field of which they’re addressing, so much as they’re “strategists” or “analysts.” I strongly suspect that part of the reason this is the case is talking on TV is, itself, a craft and one that requires a skill-set very different than what is required of academics.  I’m sure many academics themselves share the disdain for the format that I’ve outlined.

I’ve posted on this before. I feel the same way. I have to do cable news because it’s part of my job. But it’s often really frustrating. Especially as a libertarian. We hold positions with which most people aren’t immediately familiar. They’re also a bit more nuanced than, say, responding to any story in the news with racial overtones by noting that Robert Byrd was once in the Ku Klux Klan. A couple of anecdotes I’ve previously written about come to mind. There’s this one:

A couple of years ago, I had a telling IM exchange with an aspiring young conservative pundit. (I like the guy personally, so I’m not going to mention his name.) He had just gone on a cable network and said some things about an issue in the news that were completely wrong. So I sent him some links that showed why he was wrong. He thanked me and replied, “One of the really hard things about being a journalist is going on TV to talk about things you’re not really read up on.”

Well, no. That’s one of the “really hard” things about being a hack. I really loathe this about cable news. They bring in the same personalities to talk what’s going on in the news. It doesn’t matter if those personalities have the slightest idea what they’re talking about. They’re on TV not because they have specialized knowledge about a given story, but because they’re talented at applying standard partisan talking points to a wide variety of issues. And now, Dick Morris will talk about the Federal Reserve. Joining us to explain what the drug war violence in Mexico means to you, here’s Democratic strategist Bob Beckell.  Their job is to tell the portion of the audience that already agrees with them what the audience already thinks it knows. Everyone is stupider for it.

And this one:

So last week I did a very brief segment on a we’ll-keep-it-unnamed cable news network. While I was chatting with the producer on the phone before the show, she read me the copy they were going use to introduce me to be sure it was correct. It was just a little bit off, so I offered a change in wording, suggesting they use the phrase “Nanny State policies” instead of what she had prepared.

Her response was pretty amusing. It’s from memory, so this isn’t an exact quote. But her response went something like this: “Oh no, we don’t use that word. We’ve found that when we use the word policy our viewers lose interest, because they think something boring is coming. So our anchors never use that word, and we try to tell our guests not to use it either.”

I have one more. Several years ago I was booked to go on a past incarnation of Joe Scarborough’s show to talk about blogging. I recall that this was just after some conservative blogs had managed to get another network news person fired (but it wasn’t Dan Rather). My position, which I clearly articulated to the producer in the pre-interview, was that I thought the blogs were being a bit triumphalist about it all. Blogs were an important and emerging voice, but the traditional media was still important, blogs wouldn’t be replacing them anytime soon, and that was a good thing. When I got on the air, Scarborough went through the rest of the panel (I believe my co-panelists were Hugh Hewitt and Ana Marie Cox). When he came to me he said something like, “So Radley Balko, you think blogs are destroying America?”

I was at Cato at the time. I found out later that the producer actually got angry with Cato’s media rep because I didn’t take the more confrontational position that would have made for better TV. There’s no room for nuance on cable news.

And then there’s what you might call the Wendy Murphy Problem, which is that in the world of cable news things move so fast, the soundbites are so short, the news cycle so ephemeral, that you can pretty much get away with just making shit up. Odds are good that no one who knows better has been paying attention long enough to call you on your errors. And as long as you’re interesting, animated, and provocative, producers aren’t going to stop booking you just because you’re, well, wrong a lot. It’s a gig that rewards shamelessness. (See also this very funny story.)

I think Coates is right that serious thinkers shy away from cable news for these reasons. But I also think most producers don’t want academics and actual experts, for the same reasons. As a TV pundit your objective isn’t to educate, or inform, or even to make an educated argument in favor of your position. Your job is to reinforce what the people watching on your side already believe. People don’t watch cable news to be challenged or to learn. They watch it to get the latest talking points that they can use in their next political argument at the bar, over the water cooler, or at the dinner table. Producers know this. The cable news pundit’s comparative advantage, then, isn’t specialized knowledge. It’s the ability to distill any issue in the news into a pithy argument about why red is better than blue, or left is better than right, or how this is just further proof that the ACLU/NRA wants to eat your baby. I don’t get them as often anymore, but for a while a couple of times each month I’d get a request from cable news producer “looking for someone to come on and argue X.” Not, “We’re looking for someone with some expertise in X.” They already knew the argument they wanted to hear. They just needed a warm body to make it.

Like Coates, my favorite media hits are those that give you half hour or more to talk about an issue in-depth. That’s also why I much prefer radio to TV. (On a side note, TV is also much more difficult. I can do radio in my pajamas. Hell, I don’t even have to wear pants. TV is like playing tennis on roller skates while sipping a martini. You have to be aware of your body language, how animated you look, whether or not you’re smiling (and whether or not that’s appropriate), whether you’re rocking or indulging some other nervous tic, if your jacket is riding up your collar, and so on. What you’re actually saying is only one of about a half dozen things you’re thinking about, usually while sitting in a studio by yourself, staring into a bright light, listening through an earpiece to a host you can’t see. TV hits also take a couple hours out of your day for about five minutes of actual on-air time.)

But back to the original point. I’ll continue to do cable news, if only because I think it’s important to get a libertarian perspective out there on the issues I cover. But I turn down way more requests than I  accept. I won’t go on the air to talk about any issue or story I don’t feel I’m qualified to talk about. And given that cable news isn’t particularly interested in the issues I am qualified to talk about (save for Stossel, Napolitano, and Alyona Minkovsky), I don’t end up doing much TV. I’ve also had producers cancel me because it was pretty clear in pre-interviews that I wasn’t going to take the pre-fab position they wanted me to take.

I don’t mean to blow myself up here. I’m probably every bit as narcissistic as Wendy Murphy, Bob Beckel and the other cable news flacks I’ve slagged. I mean, I’m a blogger for God’s sake. Our marrow churns with vanity. If I could go on TV every night to talk about the issues I think are important, I sure as hell would. And a big reason I won’t go on TV to talk about things I’m not qualified to talk about is that I’m afraid I’ll embarrass myself by saying something that’s factually incorrect, an easy thing to do when you’re basing your arguments not on your own research and reporting but on things you’ve read elsewhere . . . or saw on cable news.

It’s really the noise that I loathe—the fact that you can watch an hour of cable news without learning a damn thing. And save for a few exceptions, noise isn’t just a problem for cable news, it is cable news.

• Beautiful photo.
• Are DHS employees trolling the We Won’t Fly blog?
• Stupid Obama criticism of the week.
• The Christian Science Monitor lists notable pardons, clemencies, or possible pardons and clemencies of the past year. Included on the short list: two turkeys, a dead rock star, and a 19th century folk hero.
• Police militarization watch: Check out the last few graphs of this article on police training. That mentality is a huge part of the problem. And they’re drilling it in to cadets right off the bat.

….it’s the day Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson took a more sensible, pro-personal freedom position on marijuana than 95 percent of the country’s newspaper editorial boards.