Chauncey de Vega invokes the Clarence Thomas Rule.

I should add here that I think Herman Cain is wrong about a lot of things. It has never really occurred to me that he’s wrong about them because he’s black. He’s wrong about them because, well, because he’s wrong about them.

Had one of its writers used similar slurs against a black personality who wasn’t an outspoken conservative, I’m fairly certain Atlernet would have wasted no time in severing the relationship. Which means that Alternet editors aren’t really opposed to racism. They’re fairly tolerant of racist slurs when they’re directed at black people who don’t think the way Alternet editors believe black people are supposed to think. And when it comes right down to it, harboring notions about what opinions black people should and shouldn’t be permitted to have is, in itself, pretty darned racist, isn’t it?

De Vega anticipates and  meekly attempts to deflect this point by noting how important it is for there to be a diversity of political opinion in the black community . . . just before lambasting Cain for having opinions black people should never have.

Note also that among the race-traitor transgressions de Vega lists as justification for calling Cain racist names is the fact that Cain has spoken in front of groups funded by the Koch brothers. If that makes Cain a self-hating black man, I suppose, then, that the rest of us who work for or have spoken to Koch-funded organizations also hate black people.

Which means I learned something new about myself today. I guess I can take comfort in the fact that as a newly-minted racist, I’m at least in company with the good folks at Alternet.

• Another isolated incident. And this time, a particularly inept one.
• Long and stabby things.
• I’ll be writing about this in my column on Monday, but here’s another study showing problems with the use of police dogs. My favorite bit is how the tests designed to fool the handlers were twice as likely to produce false alerts as the tests designed to fool the dogs.
• Father gets a $275 ticket for not wearing a helmet at a skateboard park. It apparently doesn’t matter that he wasn’t skateboarding.
• Man convicted of murder despite no body, no physical evidence of a crime, and no proof the alleged victim is actually dead.

The GOP shows that for all their recent rhetoric about the sacredness of the Constitution, the document is really little more than a political prop.

Today, Democrats offered a motion to recommit on legislation to extend expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act to ensure that PATRIOT Act powers are not used to violate the Constitutional freedoms and protections guaranteed to all Americans. The motion included two parts:

No Constitutional shortcuts. When investigating American citizens, the government must comply with the Constitution, even in national security investigations

Challenging unconstitutional action. If a citizen challenges the government’s use of PATRIOT Act power in a court of law, the case must be expedited to ensure the individual’s rights are upheld.

Just two House Republicans voted for the measure. Sure, this was a stunt by the Democrats. Sort of like the “read the bills” proposals from Republicans are, also, stunts. But that’s sort of the problem. We’ve reached the point where merely asking the government to respect the constitutional rights of American citizens, or that members of Congress actually read bills before they vote on them, have become quaint notions; handy for political posturing, but they’re ideas that tend to elicit only scoffs from serious Washington people.

If you’re in the Nashville area, come out to Mafioza’s tonight from 5:30 to 9:30pm.

I’ll be there, along with copies of Reason, and the folks from Liberty on the Rocks.

Off duty female police sergeant gets into a bar fight with another woman, smashes a glass into the woman’s head, then grinds the shards into her scalp.

The good news? The Detroit Police Department fired her, and the DA charged her with aggravated assault.

The bad news? She’s now deputy police chief for the town of Highland Park.

• Maryland SWAT team raids a “high stakes” poker game . . . with a $65 buy-in.
• Fox News runs old footage to make it appear as if CPAC crowd is booing Ron Paul’s straw-poll win.
• Bieber fever gets creepy.
• Another local news station beclowns itself with “iDosing” hysteria.
• God bless the Internet. Google puts old Spy magazines online. For freesies.
• Cop reports another cop for sexual battery. Guess which one got fired? Guess which one is on paid leave?
• Interesting post by Jerry Brito on happiness, prosperity, and stagnation.
• Thank God this animal will soon be off the streets.
• Tea Party-backed candidates clash with House GOP leaders over defense spending. I’ve had my problems with the Tea Party, but this and the PATRIOT Act revolt are encouraging signs.

From my native Hoosier state:

A former Indiana mayor who won over voters in the 1930s is proving less popular with modern city leaders trying to choose a name for a new government center.

Harry Baals (bawlz) is the runaway favorite in online voting to name the new building in Fort Wayne. But Deputy Mayor Beth Malloy tells The Journal Gazette that the city probably won’t name the center after its longest tenured mayor because of the jokes it could inspire.

No business sense, these testy politicians. T-shirt sales to the frat guy market alone could probably fund next year’s city budget.

A school district in Colorado is forbidding a kid from taking his anti-seizure medication. Why? Because it contains THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. But it’s not like he’s smoking up between classes. It’s a damned lozenge.

They shouldn’t have had to, but the kids parents quite reasonably asked if he could be permitted to walk home during the day to take the drug. Nope. There are rules to be followed.

You know what would be great? If public school boards had as little tolerance for crappy teachers and boneheaded administrators as they do for demon drugs.

According to the Orlandon Sentinel, Davie, Florida police officer Kevin Kilpatrick has been on paid leave for seven years. During that time, he has received full pay and benefits, plus annual raises. He has collected more than a half million dollars for doing nothing. The department has twice tried to fire Kilpatrick because of an alleged DUI and an alleged attempt to cover up a domestic abuse incident. Both times the department was overturned (once by an arbitrator, once by a federal judge) for violating agrements in the union-negotiated police contract.

If Kilpatrick can hold on until 2014, he’ll get to retire with a full pension.

Headline of the day.

• An invitation to this event arrived in my email. I think I’ll pass. A colonoscopy sounds like a more pleasant way to spend an evening.
• National Research Council study says the FBI overstated the science in its case against accused anthrax killer Bruce Ivins.
• Rick Santorum talks about his “Google problem”. I like that his defenders are appealing to civility. The guy thinks there should be laws preventing gay people from having sex in their own homes, and likens homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality.
• I don’t know much about this case, but the summary has all the red flags of yet another bogus sex abuse prosecution. It also comes with natural suspicion of any case handled by Maricopa County DA Andrew Peyton Thomas.
• Scottish Deerhound wins Best in Show at Westminster. I like these dogs. They look like Muppets.
• In Baltimore, a police officer is supposed to review red light camera citations to match the license plate with the person who is issued the ticket. Somehow, 2,000 red light tickets were recently verified with the signature of a police officer who is dead.
• Slate looks at the new Frank Gehry building in Miami.

Here’s a headline that will drive a libertarian to drink.

I first wrote about the Anthony Graves case last October. He was released after 18 years on death row. He was convicted of helping Robert Earl Carter kill six people in 1992. Graves was convicted based on testimony from Carter (which Cater later recanted) and police officers who claimed to have overheard jailhouse chatter implicating Graves.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which initially granted Graves a new trial, went out of its way to point out the prosecutorial misconduct of then-DA Charles Sebasta, including withholding exculpatory evidence and knowingly putting on false evidence.

Bill Parham, the DA for Washington and Burleson counties and the man who dropped the charges against Graves, told the Houston Chronicle last year: “He’s an innocent man. There is nothing that connects Anthony Graves to this crime. I did what I did because that’s the right thing to do.”

Unfortunately, the court order allowing Graves to be released didn’t include the word “innocent”, a word usually reserved for DNA exonerations. Under Texas law, that means Graves is ineligible for compensation for a wrongful conviction.

• Headline double entendres of the day, here and here.
• No indictment in the police killing of D.J. Henry.
• Smart piece by Christopher Beam on the disparity between the crime rate versus public perception of the crime rate.
• Skip Oliva on the NFL and crony capitalism.
• The public health fanatics who took down Four Loko now taking aim at non-alcoholic energy drinks. These idiots aren’t going to stop until they’ve childproofed everything.
• This is probably something to start worrying about, don’t you think?

. . . is on the Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen ritual sex abuse case in Ohio.

Two Rutgers students are suing the New Brunswick, New Jersey, police department, claiming they were beaten during a mistaken drug raid:

“I didn’t hear anyone say ‘police’ or anything, I thought we were being robbed,” said Jake Kostman, a Rutgers University student.

Two Rutgers roommates say they were sleeping in the early morning hours of December 10th and had no idea who was barging into the basement room they share in an off-campus house in New Brunswick.

“I got hit in the face; I got hit in the ribs. That’s basically what happened,” said Kareem Najjar, a Rutgers University student.

“I remember basically waking up to being hit, on the side of my face, on my back I got kicked a couple of times and stepped on,” Kostman said.

Pictures show boot marks left on Kostman’s back.

“One person was standing on my back another was standing on my head,” Najjar said.

“It’s really scary, really intimidating when there are people just yelling at your and hitting you, you don’t believe that it’s something that cops would do,” Kostman said.

The roommates say it wasn’t until they were handcuffed that they were told this was a raid by New Brunswick Police who apparently had a warrant for someone else in the house.

“You were never arrested?” Eyewitness News reporter Sarah Wallace asked.

“No, and we asked why we were being arrested and they said, ‘you’re not being arrested you are being detained’,” Najjar said.

Once they were finally released, they say the cops had ransacked their room, and left them sitting for nearly two hours in their underwear in the cold.

Kostman claims his handcuffs were so tight and on for so long, he now has permanent nerve damage in his thumb.

“I don’t think anyone should ever be allowed to just come into your house and just beat the crap out of you,” Kostman said.

That does seem like a pretty sensible rule of thumb.

The link above includes a video with photos of the injuries. According to this article, police found ecstasy, pot, and LSD elsewhere in the house, but the fact that these two weren’t arrested or charge suggests they rented the basement separately.

Remember folks, every time a social conservative cries, a hot, naughty angel loses her wings.

Ron Paul, though technically still a Republican, has given up his GOP identity to embrace the chance to be the poster child for the more libertarian streak that has run rampant through CPAC, largely unabated for the past two years. . . Gary Johnson was only added to the lineup at the last minute, his presence stoking the flame of immoral libertarianism that actually advocated for legalized pot and the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual unions.

In other words, this year’s CPAC wasn’t about advancing conservatism. Rather, it exposed the radically disrespectful element of the libertine. . .

It is the libertarian in attendance that produced the free pornographic calendar passed out to attendees in 2010. It is the libertarians in attendance who openly promote the inclusion of groups like GOProud, largely as an attempt to silence groups who would speak in strong support of traditional moral values. It is the libertarian in attendance who slandered President George Bush, by claiming his appreciation for the Constitution was best summed up as a “damn piece of paper.” It is the libertarian in attendance that proclaimed the war to prevent terrorists from regathering strength and coming after our homeland as “illegal.” And it is the libertarian in attendance that eschewed, booed, cajoled and screamed “war criminal” to Vice President Dick Cheney, a man who served his country with commitment and still attempts to help the world understand the threat of the radical Islamic element devising plans to eliminate us and our allies.

Wait, someone was handing out pornographic calendars at CPAC? How can I get one?

I think my favorite CPAC moment comes from Julie Borowski’s Twitter feed:

I witnessed someone calling Ron Paul people a “cult” while eating a cake shaped like Reagan’s face.

Okay, Nashville-area Agitatortots, I think it’s about time we had a meetup.

The folks at the Nashville chapter of Liberty on the Rocks asked if I would come to their monthly happy hour this week. That seems like a pretty good way to do the meetup, too. So let’s do this.

Details: This Thursday from 5:30-9:30pm at Mafioza’s, 2400 12th South Ave.

Beers are two for one. So come have two. If this goes as previous meetups have gone, there will be much revelry and camaraderie, plus discussion of The Wire, dogs, the Cory Maye case, and brief but serious debate about that one post from a few months ago that was really the only time you’ve ever disagreed with me.

It hit 60 degrees today. That, of course, is dog park weather.

• Funny clip, but the guy missed a golden opportunity to hit Steve Harvey with a “yo’ momma” joke.
• The Bill O’Reilly “Can’t Explain That” meme.
• So in addition to its sex offender registry, the state of Iowa also has a child abuse registry. And, surprise!, it’s fraught with problems. Key line: “It takes no conviction in court to end up on the registry – only a finding by Iowa Department of Human Services staff that it was ‘more likely than not’ that the person neglected a child or, in a much smaller number of cases, abused a child.”
• A slideshow of newborn zoo animals.
• Most bizarre argument against allowing Walmart in an urban area I’ve seen to date: “Addressing a small, anti-Wal-Mart rally at City Hall on Monday, Speaks said young people would get criminal records when they couldn’t resist the temptation to steal.”
• Ron Paul wins CPAC presidential straw poll. Gary Johnson comes in third. Unfortunately, the results likely aren’t reflective of where the GOP is headed, given that the scary gays and Muslims kept all the social cons at home this year. Still, it’s good to see a growing libertarian influence on the right.
• Speaking of which, the conservative activist group Young Americans for Freedom has given Ron Paul the boot for his anti-war positions. “It’s a sad day in American history when a one-time conservative/libertarian stalwart has fallen more out of touch with America’s needs for national security then our current socialist presidential regime.” I’d submit that it’s a sad day for the conservative movement when support for endless, futile nation-building in two decade-old wars is a prerequisite for membership.

• I don’t know New York, but this Village Voice list of the top NYC restaurants at which to stage a breakup is funny in its casual cruelty.
• The latest installment in Unconvincing Internet Criticisms: The Internet makes hard-to-find stuff less hard-to-find. This apparently is a bad thing.
• Some stirrings of common sense on the “sexting” controversy from the Texas legislature.
• Conservative activist warns parents that youngsters attending CPAC may be targeted by predators infected with Teh Gay.
• The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.
• Michigan’s new governor wants to undo prison reforms that resulted in more paroles, under the guise of saving taxpayers money. This Free Press editorial explains the flaws in that logic.
• Via the comments, great foreign words that the English language needs.