You know, if I were a city politician in Detroit, I’d be working like hell to make the city as business-friendly as possible.

Yet . . .

Jeff Aquilina and partner Justin Kava — chef veterans of Matt Prentice’s restaurant operations — were inspired by effusive magazine articles, like one in Time last year, that described how gourmet street food sold from mobile trucks had become a multimillion-dollar business in Los Angeles. But when they revved up their $60,000 kitchen on wheels on the streets last month, they soon discovered that “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” in Metro Detroit were empty words when it came to selling fried pickles (“frickles”) and a Southwest brisket taco served in a crisp won-ton shell with yellow tomato salsa for $6.95.

Licensed by Wayne County, eager to pay fees and follow rules, the pair quickly hit a wall of regulations and resistance, including Detroit ordinances that essentially ban mobile food operations from anywhere near the downtown stadiums or central business district.

“They’re basically not allowed anywhere,” says Chris Gulock, a staff member now drafting a new ordinance for the city’s planning commission.

The rules prohibit even a fully inspected and licensed restaurant on wheels from public and private property in Detroit, as the law has been interpreted . . .

Restaurant owners, who are invested in fixed locations and costly operations, are loath to welcome mobile trucks that can scoot in for events and wheel away when business gets slow.

Detroit’s planning commission will hold a public hearing on the issue at 5 p.m. Thursday at Focus: HOPE. But an ordinance change will take two or three months at best, says Gulock.

Entire article here. Hat top: Nick Cheolas.

So I guess if you have ideas about solving the federal debt that involve cuts to entitlement programs, you’ve given up your right to drink good wine.

This “controversy” is about as dumb as when Republicans complain about the Obamas going on vacation while America is in a recession! Ryan wasn’t gloating about drinking good wine. He didn’t put out a press release celebrating his taste in expensive wine. No, a drunk Rutgers professor invaded his privacy, eavesdropped on his conversation, snooped to see what kind of wine he was drinking, looked up the cost of the wine on the menu, then went to the media. This is Breitbart-esque nonsense from Talking Points Memo.

Some choice bits:

The pomp and circumstance surrounding the waiter’s presentation, uncorking and decanting of the pricey Pinot Noir caught the attention of another diner who had already recognized Ryan sitting with two other men nearby.

There’s a ritual you go through with a waiter when you order a bottle of wine from restaurant. But pomp and circumstance? Really? Did they play rich people music when they brought out the wine? Did Ryan dance the secret millionaire’s jig before tasting his sample? Feinberg makes it seem as if Ryan was rubbing it in the noses of other diners that he was about to sip a fine wine that none of them could afford. Except that the drunken professor who confronted Ryan actually had to look up the price of the wine before she could be angry.

She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors’ safety net, and she didn’t know whether Ryan or his companions was going to pay for the wine and whether the two men were lobbyists.

Again, what is the point, here? That politicians who want to cut or scale back public programs aren’t allowed to spend their own money on good wine? She’d almost have a point if this was a violation of House lobbying rules. Except that she had no idea if the men Ryan was eating with were lobbyists. She just saw a congressman she loathes, started snooping, rudely took photos of his table*, then drunkenly confronted him, all on a hunch that his dinner companions might have been lobbyists. Ryan says they were economists.

“It was my birthday, and I’d had half a bottle of great wine with dinner,” she wrote in an e-mail to TPM. “I wasn’t drunk, but I was certainly emboldened to speak my mind.”

Wait a second, here. How could Feinberg—who as a business professor at Rutgers is presumably a well-paid public employee—in good conscience enjoy a half bottle of “great wine” at a fancy D.C. bistro when people are suffering? When unemployment hovers near 10 percent? When the world economy is in a tailspin? When President Obama is entertaining cuts to Social Security and Medicare? Oh, that’s right. She has the correct opinions on all of theses issues. So she’s allowed to enjoy good wine with a clean conscience.

Feinberg said all three men were “droning on loudly during the evening that liberals think that if you’re a millionaire, you have done something wrong.”

I doubt this happened. Agree or disagree with his politics, everything I’ve read about Ryan indicates he has a mild-mannered personal demeanor. This sounds much more like a liberal university professor’s nightmarish vision of what an evil, budget-cutting, Rand-loving Republican simply must be like. Did Ryan’s monocle also pop out and splash down into his glass of expensive wine? Did he check his top hat with the maitre d’, or did he set it on the table next to his plate? Did he brush off with the back of his hand orphan children who begged him merely for scraps of house bread that otherwise would have been thrown in the trash?

I love a good politician-bashing story as much as anyone. But this reeks of mindless partisan sniping.

(*Ryan was in a public space (thought at a private restaurant). So long as the restaurant allows photography, I don’t think it should be illegal to snap his photo. That doesn’t mean it isn’t rude, just as it would be rude to snap photos of a celebrity trying to enjoy a meal.)

• Strangest story of the day.
• Washington state attorney general calls the cops on someone trying to record him in a public space.
• For Game of Thrones fans.
• Another isolated incident.
• Headline of the day.
• Philly saves $2 million per year by decriminalizing pot. It’s not exactly freedom. You still have to pay $200 to attend a “three-hour class on the ills of drug use and abuse.” But it’s a start.

So we have a cop with an (alleged) history of harassing waitresses at a diner her frequents. She files a harassment complaint, and the feds get involved . . . to sue the diner that employees the waitresses for failing to prevent the harassment.

Maybe it’s too much to expect one DOJ agency to know what another DOJ agency is doing. But wouldn’t it make a hell of a lot more sense to go after the police department that continues to employ a cop who (allegedly) habitually sexually harasses women? Isn’t there a good chance that he’s also harassing other women who don’t work at the diner, a problem that won’t be resolved with this lawsuit? (The EEOC filed this suit. I presume a suit against the sheriff’s department would be handled by the civil rights division.)

The fact that the diner fired the waitress after she filed her complaint doesn’t reflect particularly well on the management. And the article doesn’t get into much detail about what if anything the diner did to address the problem. I’d like to think that if I were the owner, I’d have filed a complaint and banned the cop from my diner.

But it’s one thing to throw out or ban your average customer. It takes some gumption to toss a cop. Cops have the power to make your life pretty damned miserable. They tend to stick together. And how often do we see misbehaving cops escape any sort of discipline? So yeah. The diner owner may lack chivalry. But unless he was joining along in the harassment, it seems a bit much to hold him liable for not single-handedly standing up to the local law enforcement establishment. In fact, in that the feds aren’t investigating the sheriff’s department, they’re sorta’ holding the diner’s owner to a higher standard than they hold themselves, no?

So this site has had close to a half million visitors in the last 24 hours. Busiest day in my 9 1/2 years of blogging. (For some perspective, last May was the first time I topped a million visitors in a month.)

The source of the traffic is the post below on the vegetable garden in Oak Park, Michigan, which made the front page of Reddit, then got a link from Drudge. If you’re new here, welcome. Hope you’ll stick around. I actually have to close comments on that post, because I just can’t keep up with them. There are about 300 still awaiting moderation.

That story is  ridiculous, of course. And I imagine the Oak Park servers and phone lines are getting a workout. Which is good. But it’s also a little strange that of all the stuff we cover here, this is what blows up the Internets.

• Michelle Bachman signs pledge to ban all forms of pornography, bashing homosexuality, vowing to “reject sharia law”.
• Interesting discussion of the environmental effects of an overboard shipping container.
• This girl is good.
• Woman arrested on theory that her cat may have died from secondhand heroin smoke. I guess we do know that smoking pot is dangerous for your dog.
• Jeffrey Tambor says the Arrested Development movie is happening.
• More evidence that calorie counts don’t work.
• Roundup of Nancy Grace-inspired Twitter reactions to the Casey Anthony verdict.
• The Nanny State gets literal: warning labels for sippy cups.

Oak Park, Michigan:

Their front yard was torn up after replacing a sewer line, so instead of replacing the dirt with grass, one Oak Park woman put in a vegetable garden and now the city is seeing green.

The list goes on: fresh basil, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, cumbers and more all filling five large planter boxes that fill the Bass family’s front yard.

Julie Bass says, “We thought we’re minding our own business, doing something not ostentatious and certainly not obnoxious or nothing that is a blight on the neighborhood, so we didn’t think people would care very much.”

But some cared very much and called the city. The city then sent out code enforcement.

“They warned us at first that we had to move the vegetables from the front, that no vegetables were allowed in the front yard. We didn’t move them because we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong, even according to city code we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. So they ticketed us and charged me with a misdemeanor,” Bass said . . .

City code says that all unpaved portions of the site shall be planted with grass or ground cover or shrubbery or other suitable live plant material. Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are what Basses see as suitable.

However, Oak Park’s Planning and Technology Director Kevin Rulkowski says the city disagrees. He says, “If you look at the dictionary, suitable means common. You can look all throughout the city and you’ll never find another vegetable garden that consumes the entire front yard.”

So what is suitable? From another local news report:

 . . .  we asked Rulkowski why it’s not suitable.

“If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster’s dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what’s common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers,” he said.

God forbid your yard doesn’t include beautiful trees, bushes and flowers. It’s your job, Oak Park citizens, to give Kevin Rulkowski pretty things to look at. According to Bass’s blog, she’s demanding her right to a jury trial. So the city plans to throw the book at her.

our attorney spoke to the prosecutor today. (for the record, my crush on him is totally finished after today.)

his position: they are going to take this all the way.

officially, this means i am facing 93 days in jail if they win.

no joke.

Well, not entirely. It’s just that if you do have a home office, you aren’t allowed to meet with anyone in it.

Legislation to accommodate home-based businesses went down in resounding defeat on second reading at the Metro Council Tuesday night, giving a victory to opponents who argued the bill would threaten the sanctity of neighborhoods.

“This is just a bad bill,” Metro Councilman Carter Todd said before the council voted 21-11, with five abstentions, to defeat it.

At issue was an ordinance introduced by Councilman Mike Jameson that sought to update the city’s antiquated home occupation code to protect those Nashvillians, who unknowingly, are illegally operating businesses from their homes.

Existing Metro law already allows residents to operate businesses from their houses, but it doesn’t permit patrons to visit for business purposes. Thus, home-based piano teachers, architects and others who have clients stop by violate the law.

“We went through the zoning codes of every comparable city in the United States,” Jameson said. “There is not a single city in the United States that flatly prohibits clients and patrons on site.”

Jameson filed a different version of the bill earlier this year but withdrew it to get further input from citizens. But even after 11 community meetings, an updated bill with various safeguards approved by the Metro Planning Commission and promises to make further accommodations, the bill failed to overcome criticism.

“If you put lipstick on a pig, you’ve still got a pig,” Councilman Jim Gotto said.

A local TV news report on this story said residents who spoke out against the bill were worried that their attorney neighbors might try to meet with criminal clients, including . . . wait for it . . . accused sex offenders. (Is there nothing they don’t ruin?)

I’m not sure how this is supposed to be enforced. Let’s say you’re an attorney or an architect who doesn’t have a home office, but you’re running late and can’t get in to your office downtown. So you ask a client to drop by your home to sign some papers. Are you in violation of the law?

All of this means that if you’d like to give some piano or guitar lessons on the side here in Music City, and you’d like to do so without fear of getting fined, you’ll have to shell out for space in an area zoned for commercial use. (That comes with a piano!) Which really kinda’ defeats the purpose of giving lessons on the side.

It also pretty much strangles the dream of running a shoestring start-up out of your home until you start making enough money to afford office space.

Powerful lobbyists conspire with big cab companies to screw over consumers and independent cab drivers, most of whom are immigrants and minorities. Can you guess on whose side the evil, corporatist libertarians will come down?

• Roger Clemens goes on trial for lying . . . to politicians. Which is a bit like putting a woman on trial for flashing her breasts at a stripper.
• Least surprising news of the day: Stimulus money intended for poor people went to lobbyists, people connected to politicians.
• Sorry, but if you want to fly, we’re going to have to open you up.
• “Officer of the Year” suspected of drug dealing.
• David Frum’s website frames the Pima County GOP controversy in an . . . interesting way.
• Monkey self-portraits.
• Illegal immigration from Mexico at its lowest point in 60 years.

Kids rat out dad over an ounce of pot.

Note that the only felony charge is child endangerment. And of course the only thing about an ounce of pot that puts your kids in danger is what the government will do to you if it finds out you have it.

I have a long article up at Huffington Post telling the story behind last week’s plea bargain in the Cory Maye case.

• This is cool.
• The tiny “stampede” of white supremacist candidates for political office.
• Madison County, MS cops respond to assault call, show up at the wrong house, go ahead and Tase a couple people anyway.
• More time-lapse goodness. Makes want to get back to Chicago for a visit.
• So I guess this was inevitable.
• Atlanta public schools caught cheating on standardized tests, too.
• Mother charged with murder after accidentally leaving her son in a hot van. It’s our old friend Paul Ebert again.
• Indiana teen charged with a felony for school sex doll prank.

Good catch by Dave Henderson:

This press release from the Pima County GOP just showed up in my inbox:

The role of the Republican Party is clear: to elect candidates and support those candidates once elected. The recent statements and actions of Chairman Brian Miller have not served to further those goals, but rather the opposite. Mr. Miller’s statements regarding the SWAT raid have created serious problems for our elected officials, money raising efforts and have divided the Party.  Mr. Miller was given repeated opportunities to either mend these fences or resign his position, and has chosen to do neither.  Instead, he has continued to make controversial statements to the press.

As is the case with any organized governing body, no elected officer should be off in their own direction.  This is especially important for the Chairman position.  When the leader of an organization speaks for himself instead of the body that he was elected to, then division and chaos are the result.  That is an unacceptable position for any organized body to be in and yet that is where the Pima GOP finds itself today.

Furthermore, in recent days serious questions have been raised as to the use of Party funds under Mr. Miller’s leadership. Mr. Miller has contracted for thousands of dollars of spending without proper Executive Committee oversight or approval which is in violation of the Committee bylaws.

In light of these concerns, the Pima GOP Executive Committee has chosen to strip Mr. Miller of his authority as Chairman.  The Precinct Committeemen of Pima County have called a special meeting and we will be convening as soon as possible to vote on a bylaws change.  If that passes the PCs will decide whether they wish to remove Mr. Miller from the board.

This is the first I’ve heard of  the improper “use of Party funds” allegation. That it’s essentially an afterthought in this press release likely indicates the seriousness of the accusation.

Note the prioritization of principles on display, here. Miller has said the raid indicates that it’s time to have a public discussion about the use of SWAT teams, and has refused to back down from that. The press release doesn’t give reasons why Miller was wrong to say that. It doesn’t even say that he’s wrong. It doesn’t defend the widespread use of SWAT teams, or the tactics used in the Guerena raid. Instead, it states that the Republican Party’s primary principle is electing and supporting Republicans, all else be damned. And Miller’s comments are apparently hurting that cause.

Put another way, speaking up for a veteran who was gunned down in his own home while defending his family from what he thought were armed intruders is apparently an act that Republican Party voters find repulsive. Which I think tells us all we need to know about the Republican Party.

Pima County GOP website here.

Awing time-lapse of the southern sky. More info here.

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

• The proper response to that new Tennessee law banning offensive bumper stickers. I can’t link to it directly, but yes, you can get the verbiage as a bumper sticker.
• Ten years after Portugal decriminalized all drugs, the number of addicts has dropped by half.
• Cisco to help China spy on its citizens.
• Woman escorted off US Airways flight after snapping photo of a rude flight attendant.
• Gene Healy on the perp walk.
• Federal wiretaps have nearly doubled under Obama.
• A proper use of a SWAT team.
• Two fun clips (here and here) from Penn & Teller’s new U.K. show.

Prague.

Enjoy!

The entire “Criminal Injustice” issue of Reason is now available online. Here’s the last handful of articles:

• Former Agitator guest-blogger Peter Moskos looks at the incentive problems with drug policing.
• Zach Weissmueller interviews Mark Kleiman.
• Peter Bagge illustrates his visit to a women’s prison.
• Irene Sullivan looks at problems with the juvenile justice system.
• Greg Beato argues for the merits of bringing prisoners online.

• Tennessee legislature takes on the dangerous threat posed by raunchy bumper stickers.
• LAPD L.A. Sheriff’s Department to stop suspending cops who “have used excessive force, driven while intoxicated, falsely imprisoned people or committed other serious misconduct.” Instead, they’ll now get a stern warning.
• Speaking of L.A., the city will settle with the family of a teen shot and killed by an LAPD cop after video evidence shows the cop lied about the incident. It’s the second time video has contradicted his testimony. Yes, the cop is still on active duty.
• Really fantastic ProPublica investigation into how the criminal justice system handles the deaths of children. Answer: Not very well.

The North Mississippi Commenter has the details on another recent Mississippi Supreme Court decision involving medical examiner Steven Hayne.

It’s really pretty remarkable. After all that has come out about Hayne, not only does the court once again refuse to entertain doubts about his credibility as an expert witness, it actually takes a concurring opinion to point out that he at least isn’t above the same expert witness guidelines that govern everyone else.

Watch as this lefty comments thread struggles to reconcile everything they know about libertarianism with the possibility that a libertarian might—just might—have done something worthwhile.

They seem positively baffled.

Thanks to Anne Knox for the link.

Was it really so important to ticket this kid for riding his bike the wrong way that he had to be chased down, Tased and pepper-sprayed, beaten, tied up, arrested, and jailed? That his mother and a family friend also needed to be arrested and charged for trying to tell the cops that he’s mentally handicapped?

Even if you take the police version of the story at face value, seems like it some point it would be prudent to look at the minor nature of the offense and the other circumstances in play here, and show some discretion. Even if that means letting a handicapped kid get away with running from a cop.