• ACLU alleges mass civil rights abuses in Puerto Rico.
• More fun in Maricopa County: Woman suing for $2.5 million after being exonerated of daycare murder. Our old friend Andrew Thomas pushed for a conviction and death sentence despite a lack of medical evidence. The grand jury twice refused to indict. Which means his case had to be really damned weak. Thomas is still facing an ethics complaint that could strip him of his Arizona law license.
• Let’s ride motorcycles.
• This is a really interesting project. The idea is to see what specific sexual content causes the MPAA to issue an R or NC-17 rating.
• Witnesses say a Houston cop—and police union office holder—tossed a tear gas canister into a tent full of people attending a barbecue cook-off because someone in the tent was critical of the military. He has been suspended—with pay, of course—pending an investigation.
• ….but it’s pronounced “steeeeen”.

FreedomWatch will air on the Fox News main channel tonight at 9pm ET. I’ll be on for a short segment to discuss asset forfeiture.

Should you heed the calls to donate to the Red Cross to help Japan? Maybe not. Here’s an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed from January of this year:

When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, the world community came to its aid. Millions of private citizens in this country and around the world reached into their household budgets and gave generously to the Haitian people who were grappling with the devastation…

Despite billions of dollars pledged from private citizens and world governments, a serious health scare has arisen. With poor sanitation, malnutrition, little safe drinking water and no sewage systems, the crowded temporary housing tent communities provide ideal breeding grounds for cholera.

One independent report has conservatively estimated that there is one toilet for every 273 people in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. Throughout Haiti, a year after we opened our hearts and wallets, the latrines are not cleaned on a regular basis and human waste spreads into the streams by the frequent rains. Now, a year later, limited water distribution continues, with little development of sustainable, municipal water-filtration systems.

In the face of these conditions, Haiti remains the non-governmental organization (NGO) capital of the world. Before the earthquake, there were more than 5,000 organizations on the ground in Haiti. From the International Red Cross to any number of church and civic organizations, Haiti is replete with people of good will who are there to make it a better place to live. Each of these organizations conducted their own fundraising campaigns after the earthquake and collected millions of dollars.

With millions of dollars at our disposal do we really lack the ability to support basic sanitation and clean water? Do we lack the ability to stop a preventable, deadly water-borne disease right off our coast? What happened to the money?

Many of the charities on the ground have reported they are setting aside a portion of their donations (sometimes up to 70 percent) for the “reconstruction” period. It’s clear from the outpouring of support many of those who donated from their own scarce family budgets believed they were giving to save lives immediately. In the face of a preventable public health emergency, like cholera, many will be surprised that more than half of their donations continue to sit in U.S. banks.

My organization has attempted for nearly a year to get the Red Cross to account for the money they collected for Haiti. In a recent meeting, I was told that 70 percent of their donations remain in “reserve” for longer-term reconstruction.

So here’s my question for any readers out there who know more about these things than I do (which isn’t much). Who deserves our donations? I’ve heard that Doctors Without Borders is on the ground early after disasters, has low overhead, and delivers immediate relief.

I’m also open to the possibility that the op-ed above is wrong, or that there are credible responses to or justifications of the points it raises. But I’d like to see those responses. It’s hard to fathom why the Red Cross would have 70 percent of Haiti donations still sitting in the bank a year later, while the country battles preventable disease outbreaks caused by poor sanitation.

MORE: A commenter points to this Felix Salmon post on Haiti last year, which also touts Doctors Without Borders (also known as MSF)—although I would guess that Salmon’s criticisms NGO efforts in Haiti may not apply to Japan. Another commenter recommends this episode of This American Life.

MORE: See also this Scott Greenfield post.

• Research team claims they’ve found Atlantis.
• Read this terrific Baylen Linnekin Reason piece on New York’s “lobstah pushah” and the regulation of food trucks.
• How to respond to a public insult.
• Something isn’t right, here.
• Some stunning, heart-wrenching photos from Japan.
• Fox Business Network, meet the Broken Window Fallacy.
• Alabama man shot by police who raided his house by mistake gets a $500,000 settlement.
• More questions about James O’Keefe’s editing decisions, raised this time by the news site started by Glenn Beck.
• http://ifyouwatchitbackwards.com/

Here’s Fleetwood Mac doing  a live performance of “Oh Well”.

A nugget for you rock ‘n’ roll trivia buffs:  The amount of cocaine that went into the making of this video could fill three VW buses.

Over at Hit & Run I’ve posted some thoughts on this week’s Supreme Court’s ruling in Skinner v. Switzer. The ruling allows Texas death row inmate Hank Skinner to go back to court to argue that under federal civil rights law, he’s entitled to DNA testing of the crime scene evidence in his case.

• If you haven’t seen the tsunami videos yet, you should watch them. Just . . . damn.
• Regretsy mocks a cease and desist letter.
• The sunbeam nap.
• Queens DA has concocted a fun little scheme to deprive poor people of their Miranda rights.
• Girl Scouts: 30 percent full of lies.
• So this is pretty creepy.
• Guy buys secondhand landscape paintings . . . and then adds monsters to them.
• “Snoop” Perason gets arrested in a Baltimore drug sweep. Thoughtful response from David Simon here.
• The Road to Iowa Is Paved With Pizza.
• Photographer recreates favorite childhood pictures.

• Good post from Adam Serwer on what a fair-minded, not-hyperbolic Congressional query into Islamic terrorism might look like. Unfortunately, that’s not the hearing we’re going to have.  This post of mine from last year also seems relevant.
• File this under “first world problems”.
• I love animals too, but this is pretty ridiculous.
• “Shedding our penis spines” sounds like a lyric from a Neutral Milk Hotel tune.
• That flying car you’ve asked for may finally be on the way.
• I don’t agree with all of it, but here’s a very interesting piece by Dahlia Lithwick on privacy and the Supreme Court. Justice Alito seems to have a very strange conception of privacy.
• Another SWAT officer injured by a flashbang grenade.

Charlotte, North Carolina, SWAT officer Fred Thornton was killed last month when a flashbang grenade exploded as he was securing his equipment in the trunk of his patrol car. This comes a few years after the federal government began a criminal investigation of a firm that manufactured faulty flashbangs, one of which prematurely detonated in 2008, causing permanent injury to three FBI agents.

I explain this in more detail in a column I wrote last year, but the thing to keep in mind is that the only malfunction with the flashbangs in these stories was the timing of their detonation. Had they not gone off prematurely, they would eventually have been used against U.S. citizens, just as they’re used every day in America. Most of the time, they’re used against people merely suspected of a crime, and most of the time those crimes are nonviolent, consensual drug crimes. That is, by design, when they’re used exactly as intended, flashbangs cause serious, sometimes permanent injury to people who have yet to even be charged—much less convicted—of nonviolent, consensual crimes.

The people on the receiving end of a flashbang grenade are undoubtedly just as unprepared for their effects as Officer Thornton or the FBI agents injured in 2004. The grenades and the raids in which they’re used are intended to take their subjects by surprise. The grenade’s specific purpose is to give officers a tactical advantage in situations where they’re entering a house or a room and have no way of knowing what’s going on inside. Which means they’re deployed blindly. Which means there’s a good chance the people subjected to flashbangs—which would include both suspects and innocent bystanders—are in just as defenseless a position as Thornton or the injured FBI agents were.

According to the family of Aiyana Jones, the nine-year-old Detroit girl killed in a police raid last year, the flashbang police tossed through her family’s window landed on her blanket, setting it and her on fire just before an officer mistakenly shot her. Flashbangs have set homes on fire (some resulting in fatalities), caused severe burns, and confused police officers into thinking they were coming under gunfire, causing officers to open fire themselves. The blinding, deafening effects have also induced fatal heart attacks. For all of these reasons, the NYPD, to its credit, has stopped using them.

In an interview for my column last year, Clay Conrad, a Texas criminal defense attorney who has challenged the use of flashbangs in court, offered an interesting proposition. “We were prepared to argue that if these things are as harmless as the state claims, we should be able to detonate one in the courtroom. That would have been fun.”

I doubt any court would allow that. Which is precisely the point. Weapons like tear gas or Tasers also cause injury, but they’re only used (or at least they’re only supposed to be used) against someone who has demonstrated that they are an immediate threat to police or those around them. Flashbangs are usually deployed before the suspect has been given a chance to comply peacefully.

The devices that killed Officer Thornton and injured those FBI agents did exactly what they’re supposed to do. It’s just that from the officers’ perspective, the devices went off at the wrong time. We should be asking why,we permit the government to routinely use the same devices against U.S. citizens.

• Single-serving blog of time-lapse videos. There goes your afternoon.
• More D.C. cops busted in stolen property sting.
• HBO to produce series about magicians who use illusions and trickery to fight Hitler. I will watch the hell out of this, even if it’s terrible. Especially if it’s terrible.
• More “War on Cops” nonsense from USA Today. Here are the actual stats for 2011.
• Headline of the day.
• When it comes to medical marijuana, the Obama administration isn’t all that interested in the whole “scientific integrity” thing.

. . . this is my new favorite thing on the Internet.

• Elderly NYC woman gets a $100 ticket for putting a newspaper in a public trash can.
• Amtrak police chief furious at TSA for train station searches.
• NY Times editorial board ignores its own reporting in playing down the effects of the new CPSIA regulations.
• Florida state senator want to make it a felony to . . . photograph farms.
• PR service hiring actors to call in to right-wing radio talk shows.
• Supreme Court bars a broad exemption government agencies have been using to deny FOIA requests.
• Interesting old Joan Didion essay on the history of HOV lanes.
• More evidence that lack of a sense of humor appears to be a requirement to become a public school administrator.

The April issue of Reason, out now, has a cover package of stories dissecting the panic over January’s Tucson shootings. I think it’s one of the best things we’ve done at the magazine since I’ve been on the masthead. Not necessarily just for the coverage of Tuscon, but because it’s a useful roadmap for guarding civil liberties any time these sorts of tragedies happen. It is in many ways a plea for us to recognize that in a country of 320 million people, bad things are going to happen. There’s a very human instinct to find meaning in tragedy, but too often it quickly bleeds into scapegoating, panic-based legislation, and projecting our fears in other areas, such as onto our political opponents, or those groups at the margins about whom you or I or the people in charge have, you know, always had doubts.

The package includes analysis of how both left and right sought to exploit the mass shooting for partisan purposes, in some instances before we even had an official body count; an anatomy of how government inevitably uses these tragedies to claim more power at the expense of civil liberties; caution against the urge to lay undeserved blame, pass reckless legislation, or make it easier to condemn, criminally charge, or forcibly commit people for being strange, holding unpopular political beliefs, or acting out of the ordinary; and, most of all, a spirited defense of free speech.

My piece, adopted from this blog post, will go online a bit later.

For now, here’s Matt Welch’s editor’s note introducing the package.

. . . questions the conventional wisdom that the Solicitor General should always advocate on behalf of the government.

I have a short article on this in the new issue of Reason: The NIH has a fun library of online public health posters from all over the world, going back to the early 20th century. You can spend hours browsing through them. A few of my favorites:

Glenn Greenwald scolds Obama supporters still sitting on their hands over the treatment of Bradley Manning. He also describes that treatment in detail:

Let’s review Manning’s detention over the last nine straight months:  23-hour/day solitary confinement; barred even from exercising in his cell; one hour total outside his cell per day where he’s allowed to walk around in circles in a room alone while shackled, and is returned to his cell the minute he stops walking; forced to respond to guards’ inquiries literally every 5 minutes, all day, everyday; and awakened at night each time he is curled up in the corner of his bed or otherwise outside the guards’ full view.  Is there anyone who doubts that these measures — and especially this prolonged forced nudity — are punitive and designed to further erode his mental health, physical health and will?  As The Guardian reported last year, forced nudity is almost certainly a breach of the Geneva Conventions; the Conventions do not technically apply to Manning, as he is not a prisoner of war, but they certainly establish the minimal protections to which all detainees — let alone citizens convicted of nothing — are entitled.

Manning is getting far worse treatment than Timothy McVeigh, Jared Loughner, or your run-of-the-mill serial killer. It’s important to remember here that Manning didn’t covertly leak classified information to a foreign enemy. He leaked classified information to a website knowing that all of it would eventually be published. That’s an important difference. Manning  knew that the U.S. government would know what information was leaked, and that it would know who would have access to the leaked information (everyone). The U.S. government has also conceded that it’s unlikely Manning’s leaks did any substantial harm.

That’s a much less serious offense than that of, say, Aldrich Ames, who secretly turned classified information over to a hostile nation, and whose treachery resulted in the deaths of CIA assets. Moreover, the government didn’t know the extent of the information Ames had sold, making the actual harm quite a bit worse. Yet Manning is also getting far worse treatment than Ames ever got.

So why is that? Here’s my guess: McVeigh, Loughner, and Ames merely killed people, or caused people to be killed. Their transgressions were despicable, but they didn’t splash any embarrassment back on the government itself (although you could argue that Ames embarrassed the government to some degree, at least in that it took so long for him to be discovered). Manning, on the other hand, embarrassed the government. In the community of people who believe government to be the noblest, most honorable, most vaunted possible calling, that’s a far worse offense. It’s probably the worst offense.

Manning embarrassed the Pentagon by revealing how easily a relatively low-ranking soldier could steal and pass off reams and reams of classified information. He embarrassed the State Department because the documents he leaked showed just how petty, vindictive, and underhanded U.S. diplomacy can be—for example, they showed that our Secretary of State ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on and collect DNA samples from leaders of other countries, including our allies. Manning also showed just how manipulative, back-stabbing, and ugly diplomacy can be in general. He exposed the personal peccadilloes and private lives of foreign leaders, and revealed that our own diplomats frequently gossiped about all of that. In short, Manning pierced the veil of high-minded sanctity in which high-ranking diplomats and heads of state tend to cloak themselves.

I don’t think Manning is the hero some have made him out to be. If he had leaked information to blow the whistle on some specific government wrongdoing, I’d be right there with the people celebrating him. But this seems more like a vindictive, reckless act undertaken by a guy who by all appearances had a grudge to bear—not to mention some likely psychiatric problems. He did break the law, and because what he did was more of a petulant information dump than genuine whistle-blowing, I’m fine with him being prosecuted for the laws he broke.

That said, he should only be prosecuted for the laws he broke, not the trumped up charges the military is now piling upon him. The government’s treatment of Manning is absolutely shameful. But it’s also revealing. Murder a government official, bomb a federal building with the aim of starting a violent revolution, covertly sell off national security secrets to America’s primary global enemy—for all of these acts you’ll be treated like a conventional criminal. Which is to say mostly humanely, with the same constitutional protections as those accused of less heinous crimes. (Unless they tag you as a terrorist.)

But make the wrong, self-important government officials look foolish, and boy will there be hell to pay.

Headline explanation here.

• Florida may be illegally detaining motorists for using large bills.
• Despite the title, this Reddit thread is more touching than sad.
• Seems like there may be a professionalism problem with the police in Beacon, New York.
• …and Portland, Oregon.
• Grits for Breakfast has a good post on some recent exonerees in Texas, including a heartbreaking story about Tony Hall, who served 15 years for a crime he didn’t commit . . . and had no family left to greet him when he was finally released.
• And it’s AARRRrrrrrrr by a head.

Yesterday I posted on two internal affairs reports addressing citizens-recording-cops incidents in New Haven, Connecticut.

The New Haven Independent now reports that the police department is giving its officers training on this issue, and the training includes clear instructions that citizens are legally permitted to record on-duty cops.

Cool little side note: Part of the training includes showing the officers this Cato Institute video, featuring commentary from Cato’s David Rittgers, IJ’s Clark Neilly, and . . . me.

Over at Hit & Run…

• NYPD detective investigated for paying off snitches with drugs.
• Okay, this is pretty funny.
• More people should be reading A. Barton Hinkle’s column. Not just the one at the link. He is consistently very good.
• Best news I’ve heard this week: There’s a new Emmylou Harris album on the way. In my interview with Marshall Chapman on the Nashville blog, I quipped that Harris is the bacon of popular music. Adding her vocal makes just about any song a little better. I thought that was a clever line until I learned that she’s a vegetarian.
• Here’s a well-written, often-amusing firsthand account of a bogus drug dog alert and ensuing search during a traffic stop.
• Insightful Fourth Amendment post from Scott Greenfield.

A couple days ago, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait pointed to an article by my Reason colleague Ron Bailey on carbon rationing, noted that Bailey had also edited a 2002 book that included an essay questioning global warming, then rather unsubtly suggested that Ron was bought and paid for.

What Chait failed to note is that Bailey has since changed his mind about global warming, and in a very public way. Now, you could argue that Bailey should have seen the light on global warming much earlier than 2006. You might also disagree with his opinions about how to best address global warming now. But you really can’t imply to your readers that Bailey’s global warming denialism is evidence that Bailey and Reason are merely serving their Koch paymasters when five years ago Bailey publicly repudiated the position you’re alleging he’s still getting paid to take. And yes, Bailey is still Reason’s science correspondent. He wasn’t fired for his apostasy. (Note: I don’t write about science or environmentalism, but from what I’ve read, I also believe that we’re experiencing climate change, and that man-made activity is likely responsible for at least a not-insignificant percentage of it.)

So yesterday, Chait again went after Bailey, this time mocking libertarians in general because one of our own, Bailey, once wrote an article that advocated an individual health insurance mandate. Bailey more than aptly responds to Chait here, and Bailey doesn’t really need me to defend him. But I’ll add a couple things, anyway. First, Chait weirdly suggests that this is some sort of libertarian hypocrisy, as if Bailey’s health care article were representative of all libertarian opinion, and that libertarians only now oppose the mandate we all once championed because, I guess, it’s being pushed by Obama.* Thing is, lots of libertarians disagreed with Bailey’s article at the time, including a good percentage of the Reason office.

Hell, someone not utterly blinkered by partisanship might even conclude that Bailey’s article and Reason‘s publication of it suggest that Reason is . . . open to heterodox ideas!  Sometimes we even publish them! In fact, someone willing to see his political opponents in a generous light might even see all this as evidence that Reason‘s editorial decisions aren’t entirely dictated by morning memos sent over from Wichita, Kansas. A generous person might also conclude that all of this suggests Ron Bailey is the kind of guy who forms his opinions based on taking in a lot of information, then abiding by his own sense of reason, logic, and his own personal values—not by who signs his paycheck.

This brings me to my second point. Chait’s post yesterday amusingly (and apparently obliviously) undermines his post from Wednesday. That is, a mere two days after Chait put up a post implying that Bailey and Reason are bought-and-paid-for Koch shills, he puts up a post mocking Bailey and Reason for writing and publishing an article that advocates a policy the Kochs have spent millions of dollars trying to overturn. And he apparently doesn’t see the disconnect.

In related news, the latest Koch scandal (which Chait also touts) is that House Republican leaders have scrapped Nancy Pelosi’s composting plan for the House cafeteria and, instead, have awarded a contract to supply Styrofoam paper cups to a company run by . . . a Koch executive!

Well that does seem pretty outrageous. Except, wait. It’s a former Koch executive. Not only that, it’s a former Koch executive who left Koch to start a company that rivals a Koch line. (Koch owns Dixie Cup.) Oh, and House Republicans had nothing to do with who got the account. It was handled by a contractor that runs the House cafeteria.

Please note that I’m not commenting on the wisdom, or lack thereof, of scrapping Pelosi’s program. Nor am I necessarily advocating the use of Styrafoam cups. Nor am I suggesting that Republican (or Democratic) politicians don’t award government contracts for corrupt reasons. I am saying that you have to try really hard to make Koch a part of this story.

(*The accusation—which Chait doesn’t make, but others have—that we at Reason are just thinly-disguised Republicans is hard to square with the fact that no full-time staffer voted for McCain in 2008. Two (including Bailey) voted for Obama. The rest voted for Barr, or didn’t vote at all.)

This story is a year old, but I somehow missed it when it first happened.

An elderly couple in New York have had their home wrongly raided by police over 50 times. For reasons I can’t quite comprehend, someone decided to enter the couple’s address as the default address on search warrants while conducting a test on police department computers. Then, apparently, at least 50 times, some NYPD cop subsequently neglected to enter the actual address he wanted to search when filling out a search warrant.

So much incompetence on display here. But here’s one thing the NY Daily News article doesn’t explicitly point out that’s worth noting: The couple (and the previous owner) complained numerous times. It wasn’t until the media ran got wind of the story that NYPD took the time to figure out the problem.

On a lighter note, the fact that the house was actually sold as all this was going on makes me wonder if this is one of those things a seller is obligated to disclose. “Oh, it’s in a great neighborhood. Really excellent schools. And there’s a lovely breakfast nook with bay windows. One thing, though. About once a month, the police are going to come into your home, point their guns at you, and probably scream at you to tell them where you’re hiding the rapist. But . . . granite countertops!”

Challenge to Agitator commenters:  Come up with a real estate euphemism that turns this into a positive.