Go easy on them. They’re just kids. But man.

I allow a pretty free range of discussion in the comments section. I generally only delete comments that are gratuitously bigoted or gratuitously insulting. That is, if you make an actual point, I’ll let most things stand. I’ve only banned about 20 people in nine years, most for habitual trolling.

All of that said, I won’t tolerate death threats. This site hits public officials pretty hard, I like to think only when it’s merited. Threatening to kill a public official is never merited. It isn’t an argument, and it taints everything we try to do here. Do it on this site and you’ll be banned. Immediately.

Something else: I’m not sticking my neck out for you. When you make a death threat here, you put me in potential legal jeopardy. In most cases, I’d go to jail to protect a source who gives me information that’s important to a story. I won’t do that for you. If you abuse the platform I’ve provided for you by playing Internet tough guy in a way that results in me getting harassed by Johnny Law, I’ll turn over your IP address and any other identifying information I have on you in a heartbeat.* If that makes me a hypocrite or a bad libertarian (and I don’t think it does either), so be it. These are the conditions for you commenting here.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is common. It isn’t. But it has happened twice in the last week. So I want to be sure we’re clear.

(*Note: I’m only talking about actual death threats, here. I’d of course oppose any government attempt to get identifying information for other purposes, though I doubt it would ever happen)

• Tanya Treadway is now trying to prevent Kansas pain doctor Linda Schneider from getting a public defender for her appeal. Remember, Treadway tried to prevent the couple from getting a public defender during their trial, too. The problem is, given that nearly all of their assets are subject to forfeiture, it’s hard to find attorneys willing to take these cases.
• Earmark in new spending bill provides $600,000 to digitize Grateful Dead paraphernalia. Also note that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert gets $440,000 for a private office. More on that scam here.
• Photos of abandoned London.
• Who will benefit from Net Neutrality regs? Lobbyists!
• New Jersey town spends $17,000 defending $5 records fee.
• War on Christmas lands ACLU on Tennessee state agency’s terrorism map.
• Niagara Falls, without water.

Friend of TheAgitator.com Noel St. John (who did that great time-lapse of the D.C. blizzard earlier this year), made another a time lapse composition of last night’s lunar eclipse. Very cool.

I have a piece in Slate today on Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway’s use of the grand jury to harass pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds.

• So if there’s anything uglier than Haley Barbour’s “Mississippi blacks didn’t have it so bad in the 1960s” comments, it’s this defense of Barbour by National Review‘s Jim Geraghty. Here’s a tip for Geraghty: The main reason people keep bringing up those Citizens Councils is that Barbour keeps praising them.
• The FCC’s threat to Internet Freedom.
• http://whenparentstext.com/
• “Legislation that bears the name of a victim of a particular crime or accident is often bad legislation.”
• Tennessee program funded by 2009 stimulus produced “shoddy work, mismanagement.”
• An evolutionary case for cannibalism.
• A science writer reads the SkyMall catalog.
• The Daily Beast: These four bodies that washed up in Long Island had nothing to do with sex ads on Craigslist. But we’re going to go ahead and make the connection, anyway.

This is great news:

Brian Aitken, who was convicted of illegally possessing two handguns that he had legally purchased in Colorado, will be spending Christmas out of prison.

Gov. Chris Christie commuted Aitken’s sentence, from seven years to time served, according to an order the governor signed today.

Aitken had appealed to Christie for commutation after being sentenced in August. According to the commutation order, Aitken will be released as “soon administratively possible.”

I’m waiting to hear back from Aitken’s attorney and family about what exactly this means. It would be nice if the guy could get his record cleared completely. But getting him out of prison is obviously the most important thing. Good for Gov. Christie. Cases like this one are exactly what the pardon and clemency power is for.

My column on Aitken’s case here.

From the Star-Ledger.

Lisa Segal wakes up every morning locked in a fetal position, her muscles in spasm from multiple sclerosis.

She’s 59 years old, and has tried everything. The only medicine that relaxes those muscles and settles her nausea is marijuana.

So when her supply runs out, she drives an hour from her Gloucester County home to Philadelphia, and walks the streets to buy pot, leaning on her cane. It scares her to death, but it’s better than spending her remaining years curled up in bed, in pain…

The medical marijuana movement aims to end this official cruelty, and allow people like Segal to live in dignity. That was the idea, anyway, when the Legislature passed the law last year. It was supposed to be up and running by now.

But thanks to Gov. Chris Christie, this effort has gone terribly off track. So Segal still has to sneak to Philly for her fix, like a criminal.

“The way the rules are written now, I’ll have no choice but to continue doing what I’m doing,” she says.

The rules drafted by the Christie administration amount to bureaucratic sabotage. And the political and legal fights they have sparked mean the delay is certain to continue for months.

One rule places a limit on potency, so the legal pot can’t be as strong as the varieties Segal can find on the street. Home delivery was allowed at first, and then banned, for reasons the Department of Health will not explain.

If a doctor wants to prescribe pot, he needs to warn patients every three months that some experts believe this treatment is ineffective, and that marijuana can be addictive.

Each distribution center can carry only three strains of pot, and hold no excess inventory. They can’t make pot cookies or brownies, even for patients with cancer or AIDS who have lung problems.

You get the idea. Sure, the law is on the books. But it was signed by former Gov. Jon Corzine, and Christie never liked it. So he is trying to strangle this baby in its crib by drafting one unworkable rule after another. Call it bureaucratic sabotage.

Lisa Segal would make for a pretty compelling Gary Johnson 2012 primary campaign commercial, don’t you think?

Here’s lefty blogger Roger Ailes, in a post that went up Sunday morning:

Libertarian Fonzie and his toadys [sic] haven’t weighed in on the DADT repeal either. Maybe they don’t think federal regulation of sexual orientation implicates liberty cocerns, at least when the regulations don’t interfere their patron’s anal sex film empire. Or maybe they’re still at Joe Manchin’s Christmas party.

For those of you unfamiliar with lefty blog code, “Libertarian Fonzie” is Reason.tv editor Nick Gillespie. “His toadys” I guess refers to the rest of us at Reason.

So there are a number of ways that you could ferret out where Reason and its writers stand on gay equality issues. You could, for example, do what Ailes did here, which is to set an arbitrary deadline in your head by which Reason must respond to a gay issue in the news and, if we fail to meet said arbitrary deadline, you conclude that we just don’t care very much about gay people. Or at least not as much as we do about whatever frivolous issue you think we spend too much time covering. (In this case, Ailes throws in the bonus ad hominem attack that we only cover obscenity laws because one of our donors, John Stagliano, was recently prosecuted under them.) Ailes’ deadline was apparently 7:30 am on the Sunday after a Saturday vote in the Senate.

But here’s another way you could find out where Reason stands on gay issues:  You could take 15 fucking seconds to use Reason’s search engine, where you’d find the thousands of words we’ve published in our magazine and on our website advocating the repeal of DADT. You’d also find the dozens of articles we’ve published advocating gay marriage, regular ridicule of homophobes, and support for gay adoption.

But then you wouldn’t get to make Fonzie jokes.

(BTW: This arbitrary deadline/”notice the silence from x” method of argumentation will henceforth be known as the Balloon Juice fallacy.)

MORE: Check out this response from John Cole at Balloon Juice. He runs off a list of Reason articles that allegedly commit the same fallacy I accuse him and Ailes of making, and adds, “Too funny.”

Hilarious. Except not one of the articles actually commits that fallacy. It looks like someone just did a search for the word “silence” on the Reason website. Which means Cole is either stupid, or he didn’t actually bother to read the articles before posting them to his main page. Here are the articles:

• In this one, Jacob Sullum criticizes Elena Kagan for refusing to answer any questions about natural rights during her confirmation hearings. Sullum’s column is about how the confirmation process robs the public from getting a sense of a Supreme Court nominee’s judicial philosophy before before deciding whether she should be confirmed.
• In this one, Matt Welch criticizes neoliberal Democrats for not opposing Obama’s profligate spending policies. John apparently doesn’t understand the difference between criticizing a website for not responding to a given issue within 24 hours and criticizing politicians for not standing up for their principles when their own party is in power.
• In this one, Steve Chapman criticizes anti-gay marriage Republicans (yes, in all of this, John’s is using an example of a Reason article defending gay marriage to prove his point) who say gay marriage will lead to all sorts of other moral decay. Chapman actually called gay marriage critics up and asked them to go on the record with specific predictions of what moral outrages would come next. None of them would answer him. Again, this isn’t remotely similar to my complaint about Cole and Ailes. I mean, not even on the same planet.
• In this one, Michael Moynihan responds to this exact variety of ad hominem attack. In this case, a New York Press editor criticized Reason for not addressing Naomi Klein’s horrible book about Milton Friedman, and tried to draw broad conclusions what our silence means. Moynihan chides him for it. At the end of the article, Moynihan turns the tables, and asks what we can infer about the New York Press silence about a libertarian book, but only to point out how stupid this sort of argument can be. Cole then uses this as an example . . . Reason making that sort of argument. Again, this either illustrates that Cole isn’t particularly bright, didn’t read the link before posting (which only bolsters my contention that he regularly makes sweeping accusations against Reason without bothering to check first to see if there’s any evidence for them), or he did read the link, knows doesn’t prove anything remotely like what he claims, yet posted it anyway thinking no one would call him on it. Which would make him a dishonest hack.
• Finally, this article mentions Hugo Chavez’s silence after an opposition coalition won a majority of seats in the Venezuelan parliament. Again, not remotely similar to the way Cole draws grand conclusions about Reason’s “silence” on a given issue.

That’s zero for five, John. Too funny.

I’ve said this before:  I don’t expect everyone or even most people to agree with Reason. I do expect adults to make adult arguments. And to actually do some checking to make sure we’ve actually done whatever it is you’re attacking us for doing.

My column this week looks at Right on Crime, a new criminal justice reform project started by a group of conservatives. I agree with them in places, disagree in others, but mostly have praise for them for being serious and thoughtful. Which is better than conservatives have been on these issues for about 40 years.

Here’s a Skype interview I did about the death penalty with the Alyona Show a couple weeks ago.

• Police militarization watch. I like that it’s resistant to land mines.
• Jury rebellion in Montana. We need more of this.
• Another reason to like Rep. Jeff Flake.
• I’ll bet there are people who could find a Commerce Clause justification for this.
• More mockery of the pardon power.
• The tone of this article is unfortunate. The reporter seems irritated not by the fact that cops are lying on the witness stand, but that when they caught, it can on some occasions make it more difficult for them to do their jobs.
• Nigeria’s burgeoning film industry.

Syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock joins the ranks of those calling for the execution of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

The U.S. remains at war with Muslim fanatics who plot mass murder against Americans and our friends overseas. From Mogadishu to Tehran to Pyongyang, bad men wish America the worst. That’s why WikiLeaks is neither funny nor cute nor just a “newsy” offshoot of the logorrhea that fuels breathless “tweets” about Kardashian leg-waxings and such.

Underscoring this point also serves justice. WikiLeaks’s alleged chief source, Pfc. Bradley Manning, should be court-martialed for espionage and treason. If convicted, he should be placed against a wall and executed by firing squad. (If extradited here, Assange deserves the same sendoff.) Maybe that will persuade Americans to stop flapping their gums about things that will enable murderers.

Murdock also posits a counterfactual American Revolution in which Bradley Manning tips off the British at Valley Forge Battle of Trenton. Given Murdock’s fondness for imperialism and his eagerness to do away with anyone who gets in its way, I don’t know that he’s doing himself many favors by invoking the colonists who shook off the British empire.*

Reader Johnny Cook sent me Murdock’s column, and also pointed to this 2005 Murdock column about the Danziger Bridge shootings shortly after Hurricane Katrina:

Rather than applaud as 14 contractors crossed the Danziger Bridge to fix the 17th Street Canal that faltered and submerged their city, a well-armed band of hoodlums instead opened fire on these engineers. NOPD officers, on hand to provide security, shot back at these hooligans. In a magnificent and morally pristine use of force, the NOPD killed two of these goons and wounded two others in a firefight. They also captured two more who fled, one of whom was injured in an exchange of bullets.

If these derelicts hindered the levee-doctors’ work for even a quarter hour, that would have been 15 minutes too many. Katrina’s still-trapped victims can thank these criminals, not George W. Bush, for this latest delay in getting help.

Murdock was entirely wrong about what happened on Danziger Bridge. The two men killed by NOPD weren’t weren’t “hooligans” or “goons”. They hadn’t fired on anyone. They weren’t even armed. James Brissette, 19, and the 40-year-old Ronald Madison, who was mentally handicapped, were gunned down by cops on both sides of the bridge as they tried to escape the flooding. Six other people were wounded. Four NOPD officers have since been charged under federal civil rights law for the murders and subsequent cover-up. Two other NOPD officers, investigators who initially cleared the other cops, have been charged with obstruction and falsifying reports. Murdock gets bonus points for being so thoroughly, bombastically wrong (“morally pristine use of force”?) in the same column in which he actually mocks civil rights activist Randall Robinson for perpetuating a separate falsehood about Katrina because it fit Robinson’s own narrative about race relations. (Robinson at least issued a retraction. If Murdock has corrected his slander of the Danziger Bridge victims, I can’t find it.) Even Murdock’s narrative was wrong. Danziger Bridge was hardly the only example of jaw-dropping police brutality after the storm.

There’s a point here—beyond Murdock’s habit of cheering on state executions. Murdock botched the Danziger Bridge story (as did a number of other people) because he credulously parroted government officials, in this case, the NOPD officers on the bridge and their enablers in the police department. But the government lied. These cops killed people, and then they and the police department lied about it. Then Murdock, who holds a healthy distrust of government on matters unrelated to crime and national security, bought the lie, and used his platform to smear Brissette and Madison, and make heroes of the government employees who killed them.

Obviously NOPD isn’t the State Department. The stakes and the stage were much smaller in New Orleans than they are in the Wikileaks story. But the premise is the same. Governments and the people who work for them lie. They do it all the time. And on things that matter, like war and murder. This is why we need whistleblowers, leakers, and outlets willing to give them a forum. We were told that Iraq had huge quantities of weapons of mass destruction. We were told that everyone imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay represented the “worst of the worst”. These were lies. The case that gave us the state secrets doctrine—the judge-made law the Obama and Bush administrations have invoked to cover up yet more government lies and mistakes, including the abduction and torture of an innocent man—was itself based on a lie. Murdock has in various ways helped perpetuate the government’s lies on these stories over the years, too.

For all Murdock’s huffing about how Wikileaks has endangered lives, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has indicated that the document dumps in both July and late last month have done minimal damage. Government lies have killed far more people than leaked documents and whistle blowers ever could. As a conservative, Murdock is supposed to be skeptical of government. But when it comes to the government’s most serious powers—the power to make war and to use lethal force on its own citizens—he cheers government on. And not only does he not use his platform to keep government transparent and accountable, he uses it to call for the prosecution and execution of the people who do.

UPDATE: *Via email, Murdock writes:

“I may be an imperialist, but I am not a monarchist!”

• Tuesday will be the darkest day in 456 years. I suggest some Leonard Cohen.
• Awkward photos of office holiday parties.
• Obama issues directive to regulatory agencies on striving for scientific integrity. But per federal law, the Office of National Drug Control Policy is, of course, exempted.
• Swedish med students perform an autopsy on their professor.
• Solving the city.
• I think Patrick at Popehat has the best take yet on the stupid CSPI lawsuit against Happy Meal toys.

The great Tom Waits was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this week. I’d submit that his first three albums rank among the best first three releases of any artist in popular music.

Here’s “Martha” from Closing Time. If it catches you in the right mood, this song will make you weep.

• This kinda makes me want to try it.
• Wikileaks, espionage, and the threat to investigative journalism.
• Here’s more on that crazy case in Clarksville, Texas with the Richardson family. Your humble Agitator is quoted.
• Well he is sporting a long beard and a strange-looking head covering.
• Fortune profiles my friend, the libertarian tech guru Tim Lee.

The spiral is the last throes of a dead star. More great photos here.

One of my favorite year-end traditions—Slate’s list of unanswered questions sent to its “Explainer” feature. A few samples:

• Are all languages equally lip-readable?
• I’ve always pondered why boys like having sticks.
• When did the slang word ho first appear? I ask because I think I invented it around 1986-87 when I was in the fifth grade as a joke, but I continued to use it and it spread through my school and before long it was everywhere.
• I can’t recall ever seeing an athlete sneeze during competition . . . Is there any reason for this?
• If a person is allergic to cats (common housecat allergies) would he also be allergic to a lion?

• Jackson Free Press editor Donna Ladd reflects on the ghosts of Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Frank Melton. Ladd wrote a great piece on the crazy mayor for Reason a while back.
• CSPI sues McDonald’s over Happy Meal toys.
• Video of the day.
• Espionage Act may actually make us felons for writing, even talking about the Wikileaks cables.
• “Wikileaks is only the beginning.” And I think that’s a good thing.
• What happens when an alligator bites an electric eel?
• The great nutmeg epidemic of 2010.

Sorry the site went down. Yesterday’s Commerce Clause post brought in some crippling traffic. On that note, it’s always fun when a highly-linked, somewhat divisive post brings in new readers. Like this guy:

I mean seriously fuckwits, you all supported torture, supported outing CIA agents, and supported serious fuckwittery with the 2000 election, but you get your panties in a bind over Mandates, an idea that conservative think tanks spent 20 years selling. HFS you are all dumber than a Palin raised on lead paint Taco Bell gorditas.

He has me down pat, doesn’t he?

Also, I don’t know that conservatives have been pushing mandates. They usually condemn them. And the ones who condemn the loudest are usually the ones we find out later were secretly enjoying them.

(I’ll be here all week!)

• City of Glendale set to shell out a total of $400 million to keep the Arizona Coyotes, worth $100 million, from moving.
• Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell at Belmont University. (Obligatory Caveat: Since it’s a private university, Belmont should be legally permitted to hire/fire whom it pleases, for whatever reasons it pleases. And I’m free to criticize them for it.)
• ICE seizes domains of hip-hop blogs, won’t say why. And no, ICE isn’t the name of a rival hip-hop artist.
• I missed these when they came out, and I still haven’t looked them over yet, but you can find the first full year of data from Maryland’s SWAT transparency bill here. I wrote about the first six-month report here.
• The iPhone “snitch” ap.
• Harry Reid jumps on board the Internet gambling bandwagon. There’s a lesson here for the money-corrupts-politics crowd: Reid only switched because of support from the Vegas bricks-and-mortar casinos. Which goes to show that money can have a good influence as well as a bad one. I’ll take a corrupt congressman who votes correctly over a pure-hearted legislator who consistently gives us terrible laws. (Not saying Reid fits either description.)
• Terrible story out of Long Beach, California, where police shot and kill a man holding a water nozzle. No announcement, no order to drop the thing. Just shooting.

First, read Julian Sanchez on the health care mandate and the Commerce Clause.

Next, I posed this question to Chris Hayes on Twitter, so I’ll pose to those of you who read this site who are outraged by the Hudson ruling: Putting aside what’s codified Bill of Rights, which was ratified after the main body of the Constitution, do you believe the Constitution puts any restrictions on the powers of the federal government?

If your answer is yes, what restrictions would those be? And what test would you use to determine what the federal government can and can’t do? I’ve written this before, but after Wickard, Raich, and now, if you support it, the health insurance mandate, it’s hard to see what’s left that would be off-limits. I mean, during her confirmation hearings, Elena Kagan couldn’t even bring herself to say that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to force us to eat vegetables every day. (She did say it would be bad policy — but that’s a hell of a lot different.)

If your answer is no, that is, that the Constitution puts no real restraints on the federal government at all, why do you suppose they bothered writing and passing one in the first place? I suppose an alternate answer might be that the Constitution does place restrictions on the federal government, but those restrictions have become anachronistic given the size of the country, the complexity of modern society, and so on. To which my follow-up question would be, do you believe there should be any restrictions on the powers of the federal government? Let’s say, again, beyond those laid out in the Bill of Rights.

I guess to get at the meat of the disagreement, I should ask one more: Do you buy into the idea that the people delegate certain, limited powers to the government through the Constitution, or do you believe that the government can do whatever it wants, save for a few restrictions outlined in the Constitution? It’s not an unimportant distinction. I’m not sure it’s consistent to believe that the government gets its power from the people, but the people have gone ahead and given the government the power to do whatever it wants.

I’m not trying to be cute. I’m genuinely interested in how people on the left answer these questions. Rep. Pete Stark, a liberal Democrat, said a few months ago that he believes there are no constitutional restrictions on what the Congress can do. To hear from a sitting Congressman was refreshingly honest. And terrifying.

Think about what it means.  We have two parties who have rigged the game to ensure that someone from their ranks wins every election, nearly every time. And every 10 years, they gerrymander the districts so as few of us as possible even get that choice. All of which is why reelection rates usually top 95 percent, even though approval ratings for Congress rarely rise above 30. So Congress doesn’t really have to answer to the voters. And it really doesn’t have to answer to the Constitution.

• Studies show no cancer cluster in Erin Brockovich town. Reminds me of the Dow breast implant suit where, years after a massive settlement and a flurry of bad press, studies showed the scare stories to be without merit.
• Richard Holbrooke’s last words: “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
• Alternately, “I am here to serve the government.”
• Americans don’t care about politics. I find this encouraging.
• Troubling taser incident in Illinois. Woman pulled over, cuffed, arrested for DWI despite blowing 0.0. Her husband, who was intoxicated and in the passenger seat, gets out to check on her, ends up getting the taser.
• Correcting Dear Abby.
• More stories coming out of that big asset forfeiture lawsuit in Indiana.
• Brian Aitken supporters are asking people to call Gov. Christie tomorrow to request a pardon. Details here.