A reader writes:

You’re mistaken when you write, “. . . basically making it impossible for a non-profit, private home or apartment owner, or any other party to rent a room to out-of-towners without getting all the proper and prohibitively expensive hotel permits.”

The NY state law that took effect does not at all ban people from renting rooms in their house. It doesn’t apply to private home owners. I say this because that’s exactly what we do (through AirBnb) so of course I’ve been following this. If you own the property and live there, the law simply has no effect. The law does apply to non-owner occupied properties, which may still be too broad. But the goal is crack down on illegal hotels, which seems a fair enough goal.

Fair enough. Here’s a summary of the new law. I’m still not sure I agree with the general concept of an “illegal hotel.” But the way I characterized the law was incorrect. So I stand corrected.

A reader writes:

Having spent 26 months in California Prison (as you say, “liberatarianism happens to you”), I can tell you first hand that California Prisons have no weights.  That is only for Hollywood.  As a matter of fact, I believe they were taken out in 1994, almost 20 years ago.  Why this makes it into a Supreme Court Justice’s dissenting opinion is baffling to me, and then to not even get the facts straight is scary.

I’ve received a few emails on this point.

• New crime stats show more steady, across-the-board decline.
• The best street photographer you’ve never heard of.
• Supreme Court narrowly upholds release of prisoners from overcrowded California jails. Scalia’s dissent includes this hilarious line, which is either silly fearmongering, or below-average homoerotica: “…many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”
• Photo of the day.
• “Didn’t it, at some point in this investigation, get frustrating to discover that there’s nothing?” Angrifying story, via Hit & Run.
• “Did the DEA knowingly keep a terrorist on its payroll?” If it did, it wouldn’t be the first time the agency has prioritized drug enforcement ahead of national security.

Prague.

• Amazing color photographs from the Great Depression.
• Smoke or deal pot, and the SWAT team will violently break into your home in the middle of the night. But beat a man within an inch of his life, then run from the law, and the SWAT team will come for you in broad daylight, surround your house, make several announcements over a bullhorn, and give you the opportunity to surrender peacefully.
• Lawmakers, regulators take aim at prepaid credit cards. Because of the drugs.
• Have no idea if this actually happened. But I hope it did.
• New York City cracks down on “illegal hotels“, basically making it impossible for a non-profit, private home or apartment owner, or any other party to rent a room to out-of-towners without getting all the proper and prohibitively expensive hotel permits. Great example of how regulation often protects big businesses, and screws over just about everyone else.
• Time lapse puppy-to-adult video.

Kudos to Nashville’s News 5 for doing this investigation. Note that even if you buy into this crap—that the drug war is worth fighting, and that asset forfeiture is an essential part of fighting it—the cops are letting the drugs go in order to pursue the cash. And that’s not just in Tennessee. In my asset forfeiture piece for Reason, I found academic papers noting incidents in which cops would find a stash house, but wouldn’t bust the place until all or most of the drugs had been sold. There’s no return on a house full of dope. There’s plenty of return on a house full of cash.

And of course all of that is really beside the point. The more fundamental problem, here: This is just state-sanctioned robbery by another name.

Linkable stuff that piled up while I was away . . .

• This is an unfortunate death, but it’s absurd that prosecutors would even consider charging the woman once they knew the story. And of course we can’t have an unfortunate death without the suggestion of an absurd, ill-considered law to “ensure this never happens again.”*
• Obama graciously grants eight lame pardons.
• I don’t find the Westboro Baptist Church worthy of much attention, mostly because that’s what they want. But this is pretty great.
• Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes speaks out on the treatment of Bradley Manning.
• Meta-Reddit.
• DOJ announces says it will not pursue federal civil rights charges against the police officers who severely beat Pittsburgh music student Jordan Miles after mistaking a Mountain Dew bottle in his pocket for a gun. I wrote about the case here.
• The BBC visits a Miami jail and finds some pretty horrendous conditions.
• Utah makes it illegal to act sexy.
• Sounds like a plan.
• Very suspicious police shooting death after a traffic stop in Cobb County, Georgia.

* I overlooked the portion of the article alleging that those attending the party delayed seeking medical attention in order to usher out underage drinkers and settle on a story. If those are allegations are true, then some criminal charges are appropriate. I was referring specifically to the punch that instigated it all.

There are a number of moving Holocaust memorials around Europe, but I thought this one in Budapest was particularly poignant. When the Nazis learned that Hungary was secretly negotiating peace accords with the U.S. and Britain in 1944, they moved in to occupy Budapest. Almost immediately, they began systematically lining up the city’s Jews along the this stretch of the Danube, shooting them, then dumping their bodies into the river.

Things didn’t get much better for Hungary once it was “liberated” by the Soviets. There’s a memorial in the city honoring the Soviet army for freeing Budapest from the Nazis. It was eventually put far behind a fence. It kept getting vandalized.  I didn’t have time to tour it, but Budapest also has a museum called the “House of Terror” that documents life in Hungary under both regimes. A couple people I talked to who visited said there’s a video at the museum in which you can watch Hungarian troops change from Nazi uniforms into Soviet uniforms minutes after the Red Army moves in.

To the post directly below this one:

Then please ‘stop pretending’ to even remotely enjoy living in this country and get the fuck out Radley. God damn, go live in some shit hole third world country for all I care. Hell, you wouldn’t even be allowed to have a blog.

Convincing!

. . . even laws that apply only to the president.

Obama is now in violation of the War Powers Act. He has graciously hinted that if Congress wanted to make our war in Libya legal by formally authorizing it, he would be okay with that. But his spokesman Jay Carney also indicated yesterday that if Congress doesn’t act, the administration is just going to pretend that the War Powers Act doesn’t exist.

No, Carney didn’t explicitly say that (though he nearly did). But it’s clearly the sum of the administration’s actions and statements over the last week. President Obama is now carrying out an illegal war. And he isn’t even trying to act as if there’s any interpretation of the law that justifies what he’s doing. This comes just a couple days after Obama, the head of our current state secrets-supporting, FOIA-flouting administration, lectured the Arab world on the importance of an open, transparent government that abides by the rule of law.

We’ve reached the point where they’re not even pretending any more.

Think Progress Media Matters Alternet Fox News publishes an opinion piece from the Media Research Center suggesting that we can’t trust media organizations that receive funding from the Koch brothers Richard Melon Scaife the Templeton Foundation George Soros.

Bonus: The article links Arianna Huffington to Soros. Which I think means that during my two weeks of vacation, I magically transmogrified from a paid right-wing hack for the Koch brothers, to a paid left-wing hack for George Soros. And all without changing my position on a single issue. Ta-dah!

Now comes the part where partisans in the comments section attempt to explain why these kinds of ad hominem attacks on people they disagree with are legitimate, while the same sort of attack aimed at their own their own side is not.

And . . . go!

[Via Ed Brayton]

This video shows just how perfunctory these dog shootings can be. The cops don’t give the thing a second thought. Here’s the story:

Officers were looking for Pete Moses and Vania Sisk. According to search warrants, Moses is a suspect in the disappearance of a woman and a 5-year-old boy. Sisk is the boy’s mother.

While they’ve not been charged in the disappearances, the SWAT team arrested the pair on other charges at the Dunstan Avenue home after surrounding it the evening of April 12.

After the people in the home surrendered, the SWAT team approached to make sure no one else was inside. As ABC11 cameras recorded, the lead officer went up the front steps and then turned and fired at a dog three times – killing it.

The dog doesn’t appear to be vicious and doesn’t appear to lunge at officers. In the video, you can see a man sitting on the stoop of a home next door and others standing on the next porch as the three high-powered rounds were fired in their direction.

The bystanders were not hurt.

Eighteen-year-old Deshawn Porter told ABC11 the dog – a lab named Sheba – was his best friend.

“I didn’t know what to say,” he said. “My neighbor says they shot my dog several times.”

Porter said he asked police why the dog was killed.

“He said the dog was getting vicious and ready to attack,” said Porter.

But that’s not how others saw it. ABC11 asked the Durham Police Department about the incident. It said the officers were making a high-risk entry and the dog appeared to growl and make aggressive moves . . .

After the standoff, he said police did not apologize and took his dog’s body with them when they left the scene. He doesn’t know what was done with it.

ABC11 offered to show Durham police officials the video and to also ask if it was appropriate to discharge an automatic weapon so close to innocent civilians. They declined.

Sheer callousness. They have no interest in viewing the video? It’s not even possible that the cops could have been out of line? The Durham SWAT team, by the way, is the same squad that gave us this delightful image:

• “Just because I’m a ‘man’ doesn’t mean I can’t have a uterus.”
• Bad cops: Fired, then rehired.
• Markets in everything, rapture edition.
• Good piece by Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court’s detachment from reality when it comes to police-citizen interactions.
• You know, this is a very good question. I can understand the exception for crimes with actual victims. But it makes much less sense for consensual crimes.
• Nick Cheolas on another case of prosecutorial stubbornness in the face of wrongful conviction.
• The joke is on you, Stephen Colbert.

In another universe, Judy Henske stuck with rock, and became that universe’s Janis Joplin, only with more range. This song starts off as a sleepy blues tune, then, at about the 0:55 minute mark, it wakes up and slaps you in the face. Incredibly, the song was conceived, written, and recorded in a little over an hour.

Menlo Park, California:

When Menlo Park police officers busted into an East Palo Alto home and pointed a firearm at a two-year old girl in November, they had the wrong house, say the two homeowners, who are filing a $500,000 claim against both cities.

The cops did have a search warrant for a home on Garden Street on Nov. 2, 2010, but it wasn’t for the home of Carlos Nava and Melissa Verduzco, whose door cops broke down at 6:45 a.m. that day, reported the Palo Alto Daily News.

The East Palo Alto City Council rejected the claim on an unanimous vote. The Menlo Park City Council has yet to consider the case.

According to the claims, “A sergeant Cowans slammed (Nava’s) face to the ground and kneed him in the back of the head. Later, this officer punched (Nava) about the body,” the newspaper reported.

Other officers entered Verduzco’s room and “pointed laser-sighted firearms” at Verduzco and her 2-year-old daughter, the claims state.

It’s unclear which house cops intended to hit and what they were searching for. Menlo Park cops did not comment on the story, according to the newspaper.

Liberty lost an eloquent friend and passionate defender this week.

Jacob Sullum has posted an appreciation, and links to other tributes.

I wanted to comment a bit more on the Mark Fiorino story that guest blogger Dave Kruger posted earlier this week, because it’s pretty goddamned outrageous.

Fiorino is the guy who was accosted by police officers in Philadelphia for openly carrying a gun in the city, despite the fact that he was perfectly within his legal rights to do so. He was in full compliance with the law. The problem is that the Philadelphia cops who confronted him were ignorant of the law. In the course of the confrontation, the cops repeatedly threatened to kill Fiorino, despite the fact that, again, he had broken no laws. They also illegally detained and arrested him. They then had to release him when they actually checked the law and discovered they were wrong.

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The Fiorino case is a perfect example of that double standard. But the Fiorino case is even more pernicious. Because he’d had previous episodes with cops who were ignorant of local gun laws, Fiorino was carrying an audio recorder with him in Philadelphia. He recorded his confrontation with the Philly cops, and that audio exposed them for the ignorant, thuggish threats to the public that they are. (Note: I regularly caution against holding individual cops responsible for enforcing bad policy. I don’t use words like “ignorant” and “thuggish” lightly. These cops were both.) The recording Fiorino made of his encounter was also perfectly legal.

So what are we to then make of Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams’ decision to arrest and charge Fiorino after Fiorino posted the recordings on the Internet?

Here’s what I make of it: It’s criminal. Fiorino embarrassed Philadelphia cops, and Williams is punishing him for it. Williams and the police spokesman are claiming Fiorino deliberately provoked the cops. No, he didn’t. He didn’t wave the gun at anyone. He didn’t invite police scrutiny. The cops confronted him upon seeing a weapon he was legally carrying in a perfectly legal manner. And they were wrong. Make no mistake. This is blatant intimidation.

But while their behavior in this story was repugnant, at least the cops had the plausible explanation of ignorance for the initial confrontation, then fear for their safety when an armed man they incorrectly thought was violating the law pushed back (though neither is an excuse, and neither should exclude them from discipline). What Williams has done since is much worse. It is premeditated. Much more than the cops, Williams should know the law. Moreover, even if he didn’t know the law at the time, he has since had plenty of time to research it. By now, Williams  does know the law. (If he doesn’t, he is incompetent.) And he knows that even if Fiorino did deliberately provoke the cops to test their knowledge of Philadelphia’s gun laws, that also is not a crime.

Yet he’s charging Fiorino anyway, with “reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct”—the vague sorts of charges cops and prosecutors often fall back on when they can’t show any actual crime. A spokesperson for Williams said Fiorino was “”belligerent and hostile” to police who were investigating a possible crime. Read the transcript of the audio in the linked article above and tell me who is “belligerent and hostile.” Read it knowing who was breaking the law, who was following it, and while remaining cognizant of which party was threatening to put a bullet in the head of the other.

Note that nothing Fiorino did was on its own illegal. Willliams is attempting a striking, blatantly dishonest bit of legal chicanery. His theory goes like this:  If you undertake a series of actions that are perfectly legal and well within your rights, but that cause government agents to react in irrational ways that jeopardize public safety, you are guilty of endangering the public.

This can’t stand. It’s a blatant abuse of office. Williams is using the state’s awesome power to arrest and incarcerate to intimidate a man who exposed and embarrassed law enforcement officials who, because of their own ignorance, nearly killed him. Exposing that sort of government incompetence cannot be illegal. And it isn’t illegal.

The message Williams is sending is this: Yes, you might technically have the right to carry a gun in Philadelphia. But if you exercise that right, you should be prepared for the possibility that police officers will illegally stop you, detain you, threaten to kill you, and arrest you. And I’m not going to do a damn thing about it.  And yes, you may technically also have First Amendment rights in Philadelphia, but if you dare exercise them to let the larger public know what happened to you for exercising your right to carry a gun, I will try to put you in prison.

I’m not trying to be needlessly provocative, here. This is important. Prosecutors can’t get away with this kind of behavior. Even if the charges are eventually dropped, that isn’t enough. Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams should be arrested. And he should be charged with knowingly, criminally violating Mark Fiorino’s civil rights.

• You can now read on your iPad every issue of Playboy ever published. Buy them for the articles! Especially the November 2006 issue.
• Dumb headline of the day.
• Another attempted assault on the Fourth Amendment.
• Here’s a Kickstarter project on jury nullification that Agitator readers might have some interest in supporting.
• The Obama administration whines that the media didn’t sufficiently cover his fundraising trip to Boston. So Tim Carney obliges them, though probably not in the way they had in mind.
• The morality of profit.

So tucked into this story about a police officer who was hit by a bus while attempting to arrest a man for swearing at outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley . . . is the fact that a police officer was attempting to arrest a man for swearing at outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

Since when is it a crime to swear at politicians? To swear in public?  To swear at politicians in public?

(Via “Dan” in the comments.)

D.C. Circuit decision here.

Or, as a commenter at the Volokh Conspiracy put it:

This memorial is dedicated to honoring America’s foremost champion of free speech. It’s not a place where you can just express anything you want!!

• The NYPD cop who ordered whistle-blower Adrian Schoolcraft admitted to a mental facility has been disciplined (lightly) for possession of steroids.
• Ben Stein valiantly sticks up for the rights of rich, white, powerful, diplomat, economists accused of rape. He isn’t necessarily wrong on some points (though he is wrong on others). It’s the selective outrage. If you read/watched/listened to some on the right, you’d think the only victims of the criminal justice system are French diplomats and wealthy white lacrosse players.
• Mississippi man gets 10 years in prison for twice attempting to vote in a municipal election four years after a nonviolent felony conviction. I only know what’s in the article, but does it seem odd to anyone else that the guy would plead guilty and still get the maximum sentence?
• Not sure about the source here, but a local talk show host says an Indiana sheriff is contemplating random, warrantless searches of homes after the Barnes decision. Bad as that decision was, it certainly didn’t authorize this. And if the sheriff carries out his promise, he ought to be arrested and charged with violating the civil rights of the people he searches.
• Speaking of which, more good reactions to the Barnes decision from Scott Greenfield and Popehat.
• Long and sad story in the Washington Post about a Fairfax County, Virginia, teacher wrongly accused, arrested, and tried for sexually molesting a 12-year-old girl. The jury took 47 minutes to acquit. The story shows how an acquittal doesn’t mean “the system worked”.

Just wanted to say thank you to Radley for allowing me to guest blog while he was gone, and thanks to all of you Agitators for reading/commenting. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and hope you didn’t mind reading my drivel too much.

Few quick notes before I go, I JUST noticed that I posted a story today that I think 3 other people had already written about….my bad! This is why I don’t have my own blog…yet.

While I don’t consider myself a libertarian, I find I have a lot in common with you all when it comes to being outraged by the failing drug war, policy brutality, the erosion of our civil liberties, and an ever expanding war on terror.

Here are some of the stories that I didn’t get to blog about, but covered on our show, which I think deserve a lot of scrutiny.

• Congress is trying to slip in an extension to the Authorization of the Use of Military Force into the defense budget bill for 2012. That would grant Obama the power to declare war on and go after anyone he considers an enemy combatant, at any time, anywhere in the world.
• Erik Prince is raising a mercenary army for the UAE. Reminding us again that not only can anything can be bought these days, but that the legal boundaries of whether or not Americans can train troops for other countries are being blurred. And I think it will be a scary lesson for us to watch this trend develop, as nations no longer fight wars, just guns for hire do.
• Here’s a book that recently came out called Lockdown High: When the School House Becomes a Jail House. It examines the federal money that’s been flowing since the early 80′s to schools across the US to “make them safer”. This essentially means turning them into prisons, and using the same technologies (like biometric scanning, RFID) to monitor your kids. All while security “experts” rake in the dough. I think this one seems right up the Agitators’ ally. I interviewed Annette Fuentes on the show, but the quality is poor and we were short on time, would have loved to get into a lot more.

So it’s time for a little shameless self promotion. If you ever care to check out what we cover on The Alyona Show aside from when Radley is a guest, please do so! You can check it out on YouTube, follow us on twitter, or watch live at 6 PM EST on RT (if it’s available in your area).

Again, thank you Radley and thank you Agitators!

[Alyona]

The guy he harassed just happened to record the event on his cellphone.

As my final farewell gift, I leave you with this story of a guy legally carrying an unconcealed weapon who was accosted by a Philadelphia cop who, as is often the case, didn’t know what he was doing.  The story has been around for a couple months, but I think it’s new to The Agitator, so some of you may not have heard about it.

On a mild February afternoon, Fiorino, 25, decided to walk to an AutoZone on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly with the .40-caliber Glock he legally owns holstered in plain view on his left hip. His stroll ended when someone called out from behind: “Yo, Junior, what are you doing?”

Fiorino wheeled and saw Sgt. Michael Dougherty aiming a handgun at him.

Of course, when they later found out that “Junior” hadn’t done anything wrong, they let him go.  But, then he posted the recording on youtube and cops, being cops, just couldn’t leave well enough alone.  They just had to invite the DA to join their performance of “We are dumb as dirt”.

The Police Department heard about the YouTube clips. A new investigation was launched, and last month the District Attorney’s Office decided to charge Fiorino with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct because, a spokeswoman said, he refused to cooperate with police.

The guy plans to sue after his case is resolved, but it sure seems to be another clear example of the cops retaliating against someone who tarnished their reputation by recording their incompetence.  I’m hoping he wins.  Luckily, Philadelphia has been busy cutting school budgets so it should have plenty of ready cash to fork over to Mr. Fiorino when the city finally comes to its senses and settles.

Stossel has a more concise version of the story if you just want the highlights.

Anyway, that’s it for me.  I’m outa here.  It’s been fun and you’ve been great, but I know we’re all glad Radley is back so he can get the site back to its normal rhythm.  Oh, and thanks for the compliments on the puppy pictures.  :-)

[Posted by Dave Krueger]

Before I do a formal goodbye….just wanted to post a quick link to the Supreme Court\’s ruling that allows police to enter your home without a warrant if they smell weed, and then claim to hear noises within your home that suggest you are destroying that weed when they knock on the door.

Who else gets the feeling that police are going to start smelling a lot of weed?

[Alyona]